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Spicy!

I'm back in the canning business. That is, if you can call "making a few jars for fun, expending way more effort designing labels than is appropriate to the quality of the product, and giving them away to friends and family" a "business." And don't even suggest I try to sell my goods, because I know just enough about health department requirements to know that it's not worth the effort for me. And I could never charge enough to make any money. And there are a million other preserve-and-chutney makers out there doing a better job already (and charging $9/jar and getting away with it).

Glad that's cleared up.

I was inspired to make this stuff when my jar of Trader Joe's cranberry chutney ran out. I was making a turkey sandwich. I eat a lot of turkey sandwiches. It made perfect sense.

It's pretty tasty, but we were shocked at how spicy-hot it was when we tasted it straight out of the pot. (After canning, the heat is toned down a little.) We shouldn't have been surprised. The jar of cayenne pepper in my spice cabinet is possessed by the devil.

It's a standard Whole Foods-brand spice jar of ground cayenne, and it looks perfectly innocent. But this thing is OLD. I'd expect cayenne pepper, like any spice, to lose its punch as it ages. But the rust-colored powder in this jar intensifies as every year goes by. One of us purchased it, we're pretty sure, at the Whole Foods in Evanston, Ill., while we were in college. The copyright notice on the label is from 1995. This is some ancient-world pepper dust we're talking about.

I'd guess we have used about 25% of the jar. I'd open it to verify, but just unscrewing the lid makes me sneeze and makes my eyes water. I used some earlier tonight in the sauce for our bourbon-marinated salmon, and two hours later I touched my eye and thought my eyeball might burst into flames. This was after I had washed my hands twice and done the dishes by hand.

When I cook with this pepper, I typically add about a third of the amount of cayenne the recipe calls for. Sometimes that is too much. And I'm not a wimp when it comes to spicy food. Seriously, this jar is hot stuff.

I thought about replacing it with a new jar of cayenne that might not be so potent. But I couldn't find any at either Trader Joe's or at the giant supermarket up the street. Not a single jar, or even an empty space on the shelf where the cayenne might have been. I think it's a supernatural conspiracy. (Either that or I should have been looking under the more generic term, red pepper.)

I suppose I could go back to Whole Paycheck to pick up a new jar, but shopping at WF in the city is a nightmare.

Oh, the bourbon-marinated salmon was pretty good, I'd give it a 6.5 out of 10. The bourbon-fudge brownies I baked were a little weird and dry. No more than a 4.

I'll be away from my kitchen for a few days, so you'll be spared from more bourbon recipes until next week. Probably.

October 24, 2007 10:23 PM