Our second daughter texted me from Dakota Mart last Thursday to let me know that they were roasting Hatch chiles outside the store. Bless her for reminding me – I’d seen it advertised but forgot to put it on the calendar.
In a small South Dakota town like Hot Springs, you must never assume that any sort of fruit or vegetable stand that pops up will be there tomorrow, so I rushed over to the store and hour later and purchased some of the prized chiles from Hatch, New Mexico.
(Hatch chiles are similar to an Anaheim but the hot days and cool nights of the similar chiles grown in New Mexico are known to make them more flavorful.)
“Some” is a bit misleading because like a crazy lady, I purchased forty (I think) pounds of peppers and had the crew roast them for me. This is the first time I’ve bought them roasted and I’ll never go back to roasting my own: it was only an additional five dollars and five minutes for them to do the roasting, and I would have spent hours doing the same on my grill or broiler, likely burning the flesh of many of them.
I headed home with two boxes of roasted peppers and set to work peeling and seeding them – an easy task when they were roasted so very nicely but, um, that was a lot of peppers and it took several hours. I chopped a lot of them so that they are 100% ready to put into a recipe, but after a long time doing that, I skipped chopping and just put them straight into freezer bags after peeling and seeding. (They’re actually quite easy to chop after they’ve thawed for maybe ten minutes.)
I considered pressure canning instead of freezing, but I was out of my preferred half-pint size and since Harvey’s isn’t yet open I couldn’t dash over there to get more. 😉 Really, I just knew if I stopped peeling and seeding I was going to have a hard time getting going again.
After several hours of prepping, we now have enough green chiles in the freezer to use as many as we want through the winter. There will be lots of green chile stew, enchiladas, and smokin’ macaroni and cheese on our table this year!
I also used some of the chiles to can salsa verde with the tomatillos that are coming in from our garden. I only had enough tomatillos for six jars, but hopefully they’ll keep ripening for the next couple of weeks.
Once the salsa verde was in the water bath canner, I felt like I might as well keep going so I used frozen fruit I got from Azure to make Blackberry Jam, Earl Grey Blueberry Jam, and a very small batch of Strawberry Rhubarb.
Only the salsa verde was even on my radar for canning/preserving last week, but I’m so happy to have those chiles in my freezer and a few more jams in the pantry!
Now I’m waiting on a couple of boxes of peaches (which I bought from another temporary stand) to ripen so I can make Gingery Pickled Peaches and Vanilla-Bourbon Peach Jam. Plus, three giant zucchini are begging to be made into zucchini bread and frozen…