Making Jalapeño Poppers!

A few years back, Grandpa accidentally picked up some jalapeño pepper plants at his local nursery along with his regular variety pepper plants. He and grandma were letting them grow in the garden, but they didn’t know what to do with them since they don’t eat any spicy food of any kind. Luckily I was visiting at the time, and I eagerly volunteered to take them off their hands. Each summer since then, Grandpa has planted a jalapeño plant for me. This is one of the sweetest things anyone has ever done for me. Usually me make a big batch of poppers, and that’s just what I did this year.

Our wedding ceremony was based around the idea of celebrating the different “flavors” of life, and savoring them together. So for each anniversary I make a special meal incorporating each of the four flavors we emphasized: sweet, sour, bitter, and spicy. Usually we take a Mexican tilt toward these flavors, and the jalapeño poppers have often taken the “spicy” category. This year, I made chicken tacos with lime (sour) and cilantro (bitter), poppers (spicy), with honey fried dough balls (sweet) for dessert.

We had to celebrate our anniverary (5th!) late this year, because Chris was in Cambridge for a seminar.

(Rounding out the week). We celebrated 5 years of marriage this week, but unfortunately Chris was in Cambridge for a business seminar on our actual anniversary, the 1st. We had a nice celebration on the 3rd when he came home.

As C is adjusting to his new school, we’ve been having an early pick-up right after lunch. Monday we tried staying a little longer, until after the afternoon snack. Apparently he fell asleep on the bench while everyone else ate. I count that as a failure. I don’t think he’s ready to move away from his nap; but this schedule is so ackward since the time that I pick him up is right when Ruby wants to be napping. Lauren helps sometimes, but it doesn’t seem like a good long term solution.

C has been more interested in longer books/stories this week. He’s enjoyed the story Berta Benz and the Motorwagen quite a bit.

I’ve been enjoying making lots of Mexican food with our newly imported ingredients: huevos rancheros, and our anniversary meal of chicken tacos, poppers, and mango salsa.

The peppers were rather small and slender, so there wasn’t much room inside for the filling.

I got this great cookie press while I was in the states, and I thought it would be up to the job of filling the peppers. It got the job done, but it wasn’t terribly graceful. I had to manually break off the proper amount of filling and place it in the pepper instead of being able to shake it off or swipe it off or something more convenient. And the crank isn’t the most convenient mechanism, either.

The filling is about ½ and ½ cream cheese and finely grated mild cheddar. I have used jack and colby jack cheeses in the past, but they don’t have those here. And the cheddar here is almost as mild as a jack cheese!

I’m wearing a plastic glove, by the way, because I roasted some of the peppers for our dinner the night before and my hand was burning from the capsaicin (the stuff that makes peppers spicy) all night. I didn’t want a repeat of that!

The first step in coating the peppers: dredging in flour. Chris reminded me at the point that in the past I’ve used a four-dip process which dips the peppers in milk first, then flour, then egg, then bread crumbs. I skipped the milk this time, having forgotten it, but it worked fine.

Step two: egg. This process always gets a little messy, since are breading your fingers each time also.

The final step is rolling them in bread crumbs. The default bread in Norway is a really nice, wholesome, whole-grain loaf which goes stale in about 2 days. We always have tons of stale bread around, so I go out of my way to find recipes which use it. Breaded/fried things, bread stuffings for chicken or vegetables, bread pudding, bread crumb topping on mac and cheese, croutons… I go out of my way to slip it in anywhere I can. Otherwise, it feels so wasteful throwing away ¼ loaf of bread every other day!

This works fine for Norwegians, who eat lots of bread at just about every meal. But we never can seem to finish it in time.

You just need some chickens! They eat up all our kitchen scraps and stale bread and they turn it into EGGS! Woo hoo!

What a cutie!

What a other cutie!

C is actually eating one of the poppers! After they were seeded and fried, the peppers became rather mild. They were still a bit spicy, which is why C is drinking his milk with a rather worried look on his face.

Uh… I think she’s wearing Ander’s collar.

Chris got me flowers when I sent him out to the store — how sweet!