Preserved peppers for Christmas presents...

Preserved peppers

We're trying very hard to make as many of our Christmas presents this year as possible.  We've got Christmas bulbs and lavender bags on the go - but worryingly nowhere near finished! - and are still planning on making hankies and a hanky case, fudge and a few other things that we're keeping secret in case grandma ... shhh ... is reading this.


We did at least make some progress today with our preserved peppers.  We basically:

• roasted them in the oven until the skins were starting to blacken & blister
• left them to cool in a big bowl with cling film over it to collect all the juices
• peeled and de-seeded them which littl'un who is almost 3 loves helping with
• cut them into rough strips and preserved them in oil, white wine vinegar + lemon juice
• put them in assorted empty jars, trying to avoid those brand names embossed - is that the right word? - in the glass.  

Finally, we cut out circles from some free fabric samples with some very ancient and rather blunt pinking shears and then, with great difficulty and lots of under breath cursing, tied the fabric on the top with some odds and sods of vaguely matching ribbon.

This is the first time we've tried this so am not too confident about what they're going to taste like - I think maybe we better sample a jar for ourselves before actually giving them to anyone ....