Pepper Jelly

Last weekend I got a bit of a craving for pepper jelly with cream cheese and wheat thins.  I had everything at the house already, except for the pepper jelly.  I has plenty of peppers in my freezer though (remember the case I brought home from Lake Powell?  Yeah, there's still a lot of those.) so I did a search online to see what recipes I could come up with.

I finally settled on this one from Paula Deen. It seemed simple enough!  Since some of the chiles were hot, but most were mild, I decided to just use one cup green chiles in the recipe in stead of part green peppers and part jalepenos or serranos.  I made a double recipe (even though you aren't supposed to do that in canning).

I got everything ready to go, then realized that the family canner was at my sister-in-law's house still.  Luckily I remembered reading somewhere that you can make a water bath canner out of basically anything, so I cobbled one together with a stock pot, a strainer insert for a different pot, and some zip ties to hold them in place together.  I'm sorry I forgot to take a picture of that for you...  That canning method worked well, but only because I had two small batches.  It only held 4 pint jars at a time, so not exactly efficient for most things.

After all was said and done, I ended up with some great looking jars of pepper jelly, and will have some to enjoy for months to come.


Winter/January Decorations

I decided to break out the blues for a wintery feel this year.  I don't have a lot in these colors, but just enough to add a bit of interest.  I am loving all my colored paper lanterns.  It's so fun to be able to use any color of the rainbow!






December Book List & Yearly Totals



Doubleblind by Ann Aguirre - 302 pages
Side Jobs by Jim Butcher - 418 pages
Beauty and the Werewolf by Mercedes Lackey - 329 pages
Darkness Rising by Keri Arthur - 341 pages
Already Dead by Charlie Huston - 268 pages

TOTAL - 5 BOOKS - 1,658 PAGES


2011 TOTALS: 61 books - 22,044 pages

I've definitely slowed down a lot with my reading.  I keep getting distracted with other things like TV, movies,  comics, and video games.  Only so much free time to go around, and the books are piling up!