The easiest hot sauce ever

We love hot peppers and always have at least a few jalapeño plants in our garden. They’re usually our “golden crop” but didn’t do so well this year. There wasn’t anything wrong, per se, but they weren’t the prolific producers they had been in the past.

The beginning of the best hot sauce I’ve had. And it’s all pretty much fresh from the garden.

Anyway, Matt’s parents also had a small garden this year and planted cayenne peppers. Though I’m not quite sure why — they don’t have a particular affinity for spicy foods. They know we adore anything hot & spicy and unloaded a bunch of cayenne peppers on us.

We were happy with the gift, but we were at a loss for how to use a dozen of them. A few were thrown in chili pots and used here or there for cooking. Even with that, we still had quite a few to use, along with some other jalapeños and Anaheim peppers that were starting to get wrinkly. That’s when I came upon this recipe for hot sauce. Ours is a variation because we had different peppers, but it was simple and delicious. Next year, we plan on reserving one or two of our new “pots” for cayenne plants so we can make this again.

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Growing strong

A good harvest

Except for the zucchini, everything in this photo came from our garden in the past two days. We had about 1.5 pounds of Roma tomatoes, two more cucumbers, about eight peppers, two eggplant, a couple dozen cherry/grape tomatoes and even picked some of the edible nasturtium and borage flowers. This makes me excited that we’re at least doing something right!

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Everything is planted … almost

A couple weeks ago we planted most of our vegetables in the garden. Several hours and a few garden centers later we had our plants and herbs.

Everything is in it’s place, now it need to be planted. Peppers and eggplant in the front, tomatoes in the back.

It took a while to weed and prep all the beds but we managed and everything looks great!

Our garden is around the detached garage — we have two 4 by 6 raised beds in the back and four 4 by 4 beds along the side. It’s a perfect location because the back faces south and we get a great amount of sun throughout the day.

Last year, we didn’t rotate any of our plants, which might explain why our vegetables didn’t do so great. We switched it up this year and have everything plotted out a little differently.

Here’s our planting plan, starting in the back beds and moving around the side:

• Tomatoes – Romas, regular slicing ones (early girl and better boy) and grape, two plant of each.

• Peppers – five bell pepper plants, two jalapeño, one Anaheim and one mild banana pepper. We also planted two eggplants in that bed.

• Peas – these are winding down and we will plant cucumber and squash in that bed soon.

• Green beans — the Kentucky Wonder pole beans did great last year so we are trying those again. Still undecided on using a trellis or poles.

• Herbs – two parsley plants, cilantro, thyme, oregano, chives and two sweet basil plants. We also want a Thai basil but haven’t been able to find it this year.

• Lettuce and brussels sprouts – we planted a few different varieties, red and green looseleaf, butter crunch and another variety I don’t remember. Our broccoli was eaten by squirrels so we planted some brussel sprouts at the back of the bed.

Let’s hope everything does well this year!

Bed for the beans is prepped and ready. We’ll plant squash and cucumbers where the peas are now (back).

Matt is planting the brussel sprouts at the back of the lettuce bed.

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