This week we harvested an abundance of hot peppers – mostly tabasco, and mostly from just one plant!

My favorite use for hot peppers is to make smoked hot pepper sauce, which we then enjoy and have extra to give away throughout the next year.

These tabasco peppers were put in the smoker after harvest:

However, our smoker seems to be having some issues and refused to make smoke. It also shocked the living daylights out of me when I touched the side of it. I put the peppers in during the morning, then had various work to do, and when I checked them again in the afternoon, they were cooked and drying but barely smoked. The element is making heat, but the smoke box that receives the chips isn’t making ’em smoke well.

Well, they’ll get made into sauce anyhow. I put them in a jar and covered them with apple cider vinegar. Today I’ll blend them in the blender and add in some salt, garlic, cumin… and probably a few teaspoons of smoke seasoning.

I don’t know what’s up with the smoker, but it does give us an excuse to start working on a smokehouse. That’s been on the to-do list for years!

More peppers are coming, too.

Plus, we have two hogs to butcher in a couple of months. If we could smoke lots of meat at once it would be quite useful.

We’ll just have to look at ideas for a while, then build something.

Speaking of building something, we’re starting to assemble this today:

Yes… a greenhouse is incoming, and we have every reason to believe it will work better than our smoker.