Winter warmers…..

Its that time of year…. What to do with the last of the chilli's?
These plants have taken soooooo long to get going with our wet cold spring weather and although we're now having frosts going inot winter they're still going! (they’re obviously in a tunnel house down here in dunedin)
I planted a mix of Anaheim, habanero, wild fire, jalapeno, thai and ricotto chillis. The ricotto chilli is a plant my dad gave me for Christmas. It’s perennial and quite large, the chillis start off as green and round and ripen to bright yellow and slightly elongated. And its so damn hot! I just touched the seeds then tasted it and my mouth was on fire. Cue the milk and yoghurt swilling! Each year we normally make sweet chilli sauce from our red wild fire chillis, relish from the green, pickled chilli from the jalapeno and other stragglers and now this year we’re trying the addition of a mixed variety chilli powder!

To make this:

1. Chop chilli's into smallish pieces leaving the seeds in.

2. Place onto dehydrator trays (I use silcone ones so small bits don’t fall through) then dry until crisp.
I did these at 50-60c for about 10 hours.

3. Once dry, blitz in the coffee grinder. This is a $20 grinder from K-Mart. Works really well!
It also chops nuts into flour.

I will have these riccoto plants for sale in spring. all going well.
They ripens from green to yellow and have jet black seeds. How cool is that!!