Bell Peppers!

I think today will be called Bell Pepper Mania Day 1. There will be a Day 2 and probably a Day 3. 🙂

I do use a lot of bell peppers. Some years I grow buckets of them and last year, I got ONE . . ONE bell pepper from about six plants . . not one from each plant . . a total of ONE! The year before that I was giving away jalapeno peppers to everyone who would take them. Last year I didn’t produce a single jalapeno. Go figure!

One of the local grocery stores, about the ONLY grocery store besides Walmart or Aldi, had bell peppers on sale this week. The green ones were .38 each and the red ones were .48 each. I haven’t seen those prices in a while. At Walmart, the green ones are .86 each and the red ones are $1.48 each. Big difference, huh?

Vince and I had to take my car to the stereo shop this morning and get the USB port replaced so we left it, ran by the grocery store and got bell peppers. You know what happens when Vince is with me . . we get about three times what we need. I had planned on getting 32 peppers and I think we got 64. We were putting 8 peppers in each bag and I wasn’t paying attention to how many bags we ended up with. Vince was checking out and I was looking at something else but I think I had 8 bags of green peppers so that would be 64 green peppers and 8 red peppers. There weren’t that many red ones and they didn’t look quite as fresh as did the green ones.

They’re very nice, fresh peppers.

I got out the big slicing and dicing food processor that I don’t use that often and it quickly diced about half of the green peppers and all the red peppers.

Those four trays are in the freeze dryer now.

Then I got four more trays diced and into the freezer. I’m hoping the first batch will be done by Tuesday night. I can unload it, let it defrost overnight, then put these four trays of frozen peppers in.

There are still 31 peppers left in the fridge — half of the green ones we bought. The plan is to freeze dry those. Since that’s a little less than half of what I’ve shown (because on the 8 trays of peppers, that’s 31 green peppers and 8 red peppers), I may be able to get all the peppers on 7 trays and freeze one tray of diced potatoes. I want to mix some jars of peppers and potatoes so I don’t have to open two jars to have peppers and potatoes together.

Once the peppers are freeze dried, I will run some through the blender to make a powder, and I will vacuum seal that and will also vacuum seal the rest of the peppers in jars.

I will share some with Chad and still should have enough to last us a year and if we get many peppers in our garden this year, maybe I won’t even have to plant bell peppers next year!