We have been collecting peppers for weeks now with the sweet memory of last fall’s pepper jelly in mind. A small jar was gifted to us from our friends, a woman called Michal and a man called Jay. They work and live at this very special farm that does sort of extraordinary stuff in Monterey, Mass. And they grew, to our great fortune, a handsome crop of jalapenos in their personal garden whence this jelly was born.

But it has been no easy task locating a proper recipe for our own. Surely, we could have asked Michal and Jay for theirs. (They used the preserving book referenced in Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle — the name escapes me, but the proportions were all different and, more importantly, our pepper collection was all different.) We found these bizarre recommendations on the interwubz, calling for 6 cups of sugar to every 1 cup of minced pepper (NO), others that encouraged the use of food coloring (WHY?) and approximately zero that offered flexible proportions in a pectin-free scenario (FUCK PECTIN). Seriously, people were preserving long before pectin was commercially produced. Plus, it costs money, its origins are mysterious and we had these perfect apples from Stillman’s in the kitchen — a natural source of pectin to use in its place.

In the end we pieced together our own recipe and are, presently, hoping for the best. Just an hour or so later, it appears to be setting.

Here’s what we did. You may do this too, but no guarantees.

Ingredients

• Lots of bell peppers, of various colors and sizes. Once minced in our food processor, they totaled 4 cups
• Minced habaneros (or anything hot, it seems) with the interior flesh and seeds removed — 1 cup (about 6)
• 3 WHOLE apples (cores and all), sliced
• 3 cups of sugar
• 4 1/2 cups of white vinegar

Throw everything in a pot. Bring to a boil. Let it simmer (on medium heat) for about 25-30 minutes, or until the apple starts to fall apart. It will not look like jelly yet! Meanwhile, get the canner boiling, prep your jars. Pour the mix in when the jars are hot, seal ‘em and process for 10 minutes. These quantities filled nine 8 oz jars with a tiny bit leftover. It’s in our fridge now. It’s pretty friggin hot, but also delicious.

Editor’s note: be mindful of your hands when dealing with the hot peppers. If you neglect to use caution, you will surely regret it later, during an intimate moment with yourself or someone else.

Very suddenly this week and perhaps like many other CSA shareholders, we found ourselves with a glut of eggplant. Armed with a copy of “Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning,” we set out today to do something productive with it.

The result: five beautiful jars of Mediterranean Chutney.

More on that momentarily. But first, a word about eggplant. From The Wikipedia.

• Eggplants are native to India.
• 18th Century imperialists named them eggplants because the cultivars of the day were actually white and yellow and it was an aptronym. These days, of course, British imperialists call them aubergines. It is unclear why American imperialists have not caught on.
• Eggplants are berries. Their seeds, you may have noticed, are quite bitter. That’s because they contain tobacco — Eggplants are close relatives of tobacco plants.
• In fact, if you had 20lbs of eggplant you would have the same amount of nicotine as one cigarette. We have noted this for future preserving projects and/or smoking cessation drug patents.

Mediterranean Chutney is simple and unintimidating: an excellent gateway into preserving.

What you will need:

Tomatoes (we used about 10 San Marzanos purchased from Grateful Farm at the Cambridgeport Farmers’ Market)
An onion or two
An eggplant or three (we used 2 1/2 medium sized)
Three cloves of garlic, at least
A zucchini or two
1 cup of vinegar
1/3 cup of brown sugar
Salt, pepper, red pepper, tarragon, rosemary, oregano, whatever you have on hand
Canning jars and lids

What you do:

Wash and chop the veggies. Put them in a large saucepan with the spices and boil over low heat. When everything is soft and well blended (after about 40 minutes or so) add  the vinegar and brown sugar. You can keep it on the low heat until it looks like jam or until it’s more liquid-y. We gave it another 40 minutes or so, until it was somewhere inbetween.

Wash the jars and lids in boiling water. (We timed  this so they were still warm when we were ready to load them up with chutney.) Leave about a quarter-inch of space at the top of each jar when you’re filling them. Put on the lid and the band — and tighten them. Let them cool on a counter and then store them in the fridge.

The recipe we’re using says the flavor will improve with age, but it doesn’t indicate how long they’ll last. Fingers crossed.

Addendum

We nearly used this eggplant pickling recipe, posted on the interwubs by a Josephine Caravetta. Anyone with that many vowels in their name can surely be trusted and we may call on her next week. Please report back if you are inspired to try it.

We found this recipe in the book with the most irrepressable title ever: Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning: Traditional Techniques Using Salt, Oil, Sugar, Alcohol, Vinegar, Drying, Cold Storage, and Lactic Fermentation. This is our first, experimental batch, with tomatoes from a roadside stand in Vermont where we just spent an amazing week.

Here’s what it says to do:

Make a brine (one-quarter cup salt to one quart of water), and bring it to a boil. Allow to cool. Choose firm tomatoes, preferably (‘Campbell’ variety, for example), wash and dry them carefully, and put them in glass jars. Pour in the cooled brine, up to one and a quarter inches below the rim, and fill in the remaining space with olive oil to cover. Close the jars airtight and store them in a cool place.

These tomatoes will keep for nine to ten months; use them for sauces.

So, if you don’t hear of any reported botulism cases in the greater Boston area between now and June, you’ll know that this is, indeed, a viable, inexpensive, quick, easy way to preserve tomatoes.