Bringing in the Harvest {Freezing Peppers}

We have been very busy lately bringing in the harvest! This is a pretty fun time of year though some days leave us pretty tired too!

  Today was potato harvest day. We did our annual potato gleaning and picked up our normal truck load (The back of the pick-up very loaded!) and stored them in my parents root cellar. You can see more about our annual potato gleaning here. We are so thankful for how God blesses us with potatoes each year!

 But I am not actually going to talk about potatoes in this post. I thought I would share my simple methods of putting up peppers for the winter.

I actually am not that talented at growing peppers. This year the plants looked pretty beautiful and actually they did produce better than ever before but I still just have enough to eat and put in Salsa. But a friend had been given more peppers than she wanted (from a local gardener) and she offered them to me. I gratefully said "yes!" So I was able to freeze some for winter use. Yea!

First you start with the peppers. Wash them carefully.

 Then slice them in half and pull out the center pulp and seeds. And if you, like me, aren't sure if you are working with hot or sweet peppers, then you taste test them. You enjoy the sweet ones you try (the long red and green in the picture were sweet but another one that was almost like them was not!) and about choke on the hot one. On the little ones I just assumed they were hot and didn't bother to taste test them all.

 Then for the sweet peppers I chopped them up with a knife into the medium size pieces that I like to use on pizza and other things of that sort.

 The hot peppers I decided to chop in the food processor. I would have used this for all the peppers put I don't know how to make it do bigger chunks. If I do it for less time it has some tiny chunks and  some peppers that are hardly cut.

 With hot peppers you may want to use gloves especially if you have sensitive skin. Be careful not to rub your eyes while working on these. I am warning you- it can hurt! I like the hot peppers chopped pretty small as most of my family doesn't like big bites of hot things. :-)

  Just put into a bag and freeze. The peppers are pretty easy to break apart after they are frozen so you can freeze them all together and then just get out what you need later.

  That is my simple method of caring for peppers. Do any of you have any more tips? What is something you like to cook using peppers?