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If you’ve ever grown peppers, you know they can be quite prolific.

I usually grow at least once variety I can dry, but I’ll admit that I still haven’t used all of my dried peppers from last year. Or the year before that.

These purple peppers were not a variety I was familiar with, but they rounded out an order to get free shipping from one of the Etsy stores I but small plants from (yes it sounds like a weird source for plants, but it has worked surprisingly well the last couple years). The listing called them a Buena Mulata pepper and I did not look them up before buying.

The fruits have been delicious and I love them on sandwiches or with eggs. There’s a zing of spiciness, a hint of fruitiness, and a medium amount of meatiness. And a lot of them! This is just from one single plant, two harvests about a week apart.

I just looked them up for this post, and it looks like if I leave them longer they will turn red and dry well. So that’s probably what I do for the rest of their season.

For this experiment, I boiled the pint jar, a jar weight, a fermentation lid, and the ring to hold8 the lid on.

Once I pulled the jar out and let it cool a bit, and I started off with two fresh bay leaves and two pinches of Egyptian cumin.

I washed the peppers and peeled off their stems without cutting into the skin. I also peeled about 4 cloves of garlic.

Then I wedged the peppers in as tightly as I could with the garlic cloves popped in randomly as I went.

This time I weighed my water and tried to get 4% salinity, since I might a well try a more proper pickle. I also added a little sugar because I find sugar pairs well with spicy, and I’d read that too strong capsaicin can inhibit fermentation, so I figured a little extra food wouldn’t hurt.

We’ll see!

Update Sunday 3 August 2025: the peppers are fermenting and have lost some of their color.

I have not yet tasted the peppers.

But I did start a whole other batch of peppers pickling! This new batch used some of the brine from the cucumber pickles as the start.

The new batch also had fresh bay leaves and brown mustard seeds as seasoning, but I also added some fresh sage. This was a mix of all the other peppers, so some banana peppers, a lot of Korean gochugaru style (still green) peppers… And a third one which might also be the Korean peppers or might be something else

I know everyone else has already gotten excited about fermentation pickling and I am slow. But I’ve now got an abundance of cucumbers coming out of my garden, and it’s too many to just quick pickle.

So I started off looking for a recipe that wasn’t all about the dill (because it’s not my favorite flavor – it’s fine, but if there’s a choice I’d like to pick other things). I ended up on this blog – https://www.blessthismessplease.com/easy-fermented-pickles/ (site has medium intrusive advertising) which seemed like it prioritized good advice over a specific recipe. The one thing I’ve read other places that it did not mention was trimming the blossom end of the cucumber to reduce softening. Is that advice only relevant to vinegar pickles? I went ahead and trimmed the tips while washing them.

I got half gallon jars this year just for canning. They don’t fit anywhere in my shelves, so I’m going to have to fill them all up with pickling this Summer I guess. *goals*

My largest dutch oven is an oval, so ikt will fit the half gallon jar for boiling and sterilizing – I put a hand towel on the bottom to cushion the glass. I also boiled a glass weight and a burping kid that fits wide mouth canning jars at the same time.

After I pulled the jar, I decided to let it cool. Unlike water bath canning, there was no direction to heat up the brine at all, and I guess that might kill the bacteria we want. So if everything going into the jar will be room temperature or cooler then the jar should also be room temperature.

The instructions say to add something like bay leaves (ideally fresh) for the tannins (and flavor), so I did. Then I added a mix of coriander seeds (from last year’s garden), brown mustard seeds, and a few nigella sativa seeds. Oh! And two bay berries!

Then I stuffed about half a dozen cucumbers inside – the middle one poked up a bit and there was still a lot of headspace, so I cut up the last cucumber into chunks – so I’ll get to find out how both cut and whole cucumbers work.

Only then did I remember the garlic cloves I had peeled, so those got squeezed in wherever they would fit.

I used 1 sixteen ounce bottle of water with some salt added as would fit in the freshly opened bottle. That filled the jar about 3/4 of the way up. I did not measure the cucumbers or the salt. And I was a little worried it wasn’t quite salty enough, so I refilled the water bottle halfway with tap water I had already boiled (and let cool) with a slightly higher concentration of salt to top things off.

The instructions said to top with either a weight or a cabbage or grape leaf in order to keep the cucumbers submerged. So I figured why not both! 

And then I put on the burping lid and have set it on the corner of my kitchen counter that’s not next to the stove or the dishwasher. It doesn’t really get dark there, so I threw a kitchen towel over it.

Now for waiting and seeing what happens!

Edit Monday 29 July 2025: I think it’s looking like a healthy start to this pickle

Edit Sunday 3 August 2025: I’ve opened the jar and used done of the brine to start my next batch of pickled peppers.

I tasted one of the cut sections of cucumber that I used to fill in the top, and it tastes like a pickle! Crisp and tangy! I also ate the cabbage leaf I had stuck in the top.

The liquid is definitely cloudy, which is what was foretold as the result of using iodized salt. Cloudy picking liquid is more disappointing than I thought it would be, so I guess I’ll be sticking with plain salts in the future.

There is no mold and there’s no yeast film at the top, either. Everything smells and tastes good.

I am also disappointed in these fermentation lids – they do have enough flexibility to bulge with fermentation gases, but the lids are not self burping as promised. I keep having to loosen the rings to let gas out.

I could probably move them to the refrigerator now, but I’m more excited about the experiment than about pickles, so I’m going to keep them going and see what happens.

I boiled the jar weight before putting it back into the jar.

Okay, not spam. But I’ve been watching a lot of spam appreciation posts, so I decided to try some. But I bought the cheap knockoff version from Aldi’s

I cubed it and fried it. And decided that was too much, so I also pulled about a third of the cooked meat out and refrigerated it for future omelets and quesadillas. I also tasted it, and it mostly tasted like nothing – hot smooth fatty nothing. So I will have to retry with the actual name brand product.

I think cooked some diced onion and carrot in the rendered fat.And then added a pint container of leftover chinese takeout white rice, with all of the clumps worked out. I also have canned shelf stable kimchi because it’s not something I go through fast enough to not waste kimchi with live fermentation. But that also meant I knew it would be mild, so I added a healthy spoonful of gochujang. (Also I drained the liquid off, cut up and added the cabbage first, and then added the gochujang and kimchi liquid – and a teaspoon of soy sauce – toward the end)

And then added a pint container of leftover chinese takeout white rice, with all of the clumps worked out. I also have canned shelf stable kimchi because it’s not something I go through fast enough to not waste kimchi with live fermentation. But that also meant I knew it would be mild, so I added a healthy spoonful of gochujang. (Also I drained the liquid off, cut up and added the cabbage first, and then added the gochujang and kimchi liquid – and a teaspoon of soy sauce – toward the end)

and then I fried an egg and put it on top!

After a long week of several friends visiting and going out to fancy restaurants and eating rich food, it’s a relief to have a pickled salad hanging out in my refrigerator waiting for me.

I call this my beet shred (it has been on this blog before), but what started as misreading/misremembering a recipe is pretty much a simple salad of all the purple things together at once.

Shredded purple cabbage, thinly sliced purple onions, sliced raw beets, and some red wine vinegar.

It’s great as a taco topping or fancy side salad with a vivid presentation. But it’s also just comforting to eat on it’s own (or over rice).

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Tonight I lit candles for the first night of Hanukkah. The last two years I’ve been using the fancy menorah of my childhood, but I’ve also been missing this small one made out of gears (which move!) that I picked out and bought for myself when I established a household of my own.

So I messed up last weekend and tried to make shakshuka for friends, only to realize I had run out of the good feta cheese. So I came up with a plan and tried to ask the halal grocery store that has meal delivery if when I ordered the turkey bacon and egg platter could they maybe send me the feta (which is about the same price)? And I hoped and I waited, and I got the turkey and egg platter. Alas.

So I but it the bacon for nibbling, but I put the eggs in the refrigerator and poached fresh ones for the shakshuka.

But I had three random fried eggs.  But I also had leftover cooked rice!

Fried rice sounded like the best answer

So we diced carrots, Korean green radish, onion, garlic, ginger, Chinese sausage, and some scallions. And the fried eggs (cut up with some kitchen scissors).

We (and by we, I mean my friend @senorgrouch ) started cooking the hard vegetables first, then most of the other ingredients, and then the rice, and the eggs got added in with a handful of scallion greens.

Finished off with a sauce of 2 teaspoons of soy sauce, 4 teaspoons of shaoxing wine, and a little drizzle of sesame oil.

It still needed more salt, and we added Laoganma at the table.

We wanted a little more protein with dinner, but also wanted something simple, so I made sliced and dressed some soft tofu with Laoganma, soy sauce, black vinegar, bonito flakes, and sliced scallions.

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And then the next day I made pork rib and lotus root soup for when my friend T also joined us.

Several months ago I made a clear gelatinous stock from pig feet and froze it. So I used two quarts of the stock.

Weee! had 2 pounds of precut pork rib meat with soft bones. I started with rinsing the meat clean in cold water, then I parboiled them in water and rinsed off any foam. Then that went into the stock

This was my first time using fresh lotus roots (instead of the packaged kind), and they were easy to clean and peel.

And then I followed thewoksoflife’s advice to simmer everything for four hours. I put my oven to 220F and let it cook slowly. Their dipping sauce suggestion was also a good choice. And after I had dipped the solids, the broth did benefit from stirring in an extra pinch of salt.