Bogieblog

Hot, No, I Mean REALLY Hot!

Most summers I grow hot peppers in the garden. I don't mean Jalapeno hot, although I do grow them, those are the mild ones and I only start a couple of plants. I tend to groo more of the hotter pepprs; Habenaro, Thia Hot, Serano - you get the drift. One day I will probably forget that I read about the pepper that can reportedly strip pain, the Naga Viper. That sucker is 1,359,000 on the Scoville heat scale, which makes it the current top dog for fieriness.

I am sure one day, while perusing the seed catelogs, I will stumble across this pepper and think it is a good idea to grow it. Hopefully, I will blog about it and someone out there will remind me that on this date, I have declared that it is probably definitely something I should avoid.

Hat Tip to Scott.

Dehydrating Fun

The new dehydrator came in. I knew it would be bigger than my old one, but didn't realize that it would take up almost the entire top of the stove:

The old dryer could sit between two of the adjacent burners, so this one is much bigger. The one thing that I found odd is that the dial for controlling the thermoset is way in back. Not only do I have to have my reading glasses on, but I have to be standing tippy-toe to lean over and get a look. Not really a horrible thing, especially since my old dryer only had one heat setting, I just would have thought that they would put it toward the front.

9 Shelves! My old dehydrator had 7 shelves, and they had holes in the middle to allow the heat to rise so the footprint wasn't totally useable.
 

Dehydrating Corn

Last Monday, WS went out to pick the rest of his corn. Some of it had already started drying, so I looked up in my Stocking Up III book, what the best thing to do would be. The book asserts that drying it on the cob, then twisting the cob to release the kernels, then storing in a jar is a good way to preserve corn even for human use. Apparently it can be reconstituted in basically the same manner that is used for dry beans (who knew?), so I thought I would give it a try.

First problem is that my dehydrator trays stack on top of each other, with only about 1/2-3/4 inches of room between them. Not really a problem, just an inconvenience as that meant I could only dry one tray at a time (fortunately the lid is domed, so it would fit over the corn).

I dried one tray full like that, twisted the cobs, retrieved the kernels, and got a couple of jars of corn:

 

hopefully they reconstitute well and taste good when the time comes. If not, I'll put it in the birdfeeder.