Handful of Habaneros

I've been preparing tons of habaneros for my various sauces and salsas over the past couple of days, and it has the whole house smelling like habaneros!

These small but wonderfully tasting chiles are very hot and to enjoy them fully you must be able to handle the heat that accompanies them. Having been a pepper lover for many years now, I am used to the intense heat that habaneros possess and am able to enjoy these precious fruits in many different dishes.



Whether it is for my great Habanero Salsa, or own of my own homemade hot sauces, these peppers pack the heat and will leave many at your party reaching for their beverage to cool their mouth off!

Be careful when handling these peppers. If the juice gets into a cut on your hand or even just your bare skin it can and will irritate the skin and cause burning sensations. Always wear gloves when handling Habanero Peppers. Regarded as the third hottest pepper in the world.

The Red Habaneros are hotter than their orange cousin, however the red are harder to find at the stores, this is why I have started growing my own Habaneros!

My Blackberries are fine though, for the concerned

Despite sometimes losing the battle to the vegetable and fruit stealing critters of the wild that make their way into our garden, our blackberry vines are so bountiful, the birds can have their share and there are still plenty enough for my family. There are so many blackberries at times of the year that we cannot consume them all, so I freeze them to use in my fruit smoothies. Yum!



I took this picture this morning as soon as I went outside in the morning sun. In the background is a blooming Confederate jasmine, which smells wonderful as I take photos.

Even my dogs eat them, and the berries that form on the ground level of the vines the dogs try and steal! So if the birds don't get them, my dogs will. But that's what these beautiful vines are here for, to produce wonderful tasting berries for all on Earth to enjoy.



Above is a picture of just a portion of the blackberry I picked this morning. I wash them, and put them in bowl on counter and we eat them throughout the day. I even give them to my dogs as treats. Even our dogs love 'em.

We have so many I started giving them to the dogs as treats, they love em! The oldest dog picks them off the vine if he can reach them, and even though he gets thorns on his mouth and nose it doesn't stop him! He loves the things and rushes out the door every morning to eat some with me.

They are packed full of Vitamin A, C, and those wonderful things called anti-carcinogenic agents. The phenolics in blackberries include anthocyanins, ellagic acid, rutin, gallic acid, hydrocaffeic acid, p-coumaric acid and cinnamic acid, plus excellent contents of the antioxidant vitamins A and C.

Someone stole my cherry tomatoes!

I woke up to the most horrible thing today, I was ROBBED during the night!

A bird must have stolen my cherry tomatoes while I was asleep! Well not all of them, but some of them. LOL

Every morning, as the dew is still glistening in the morning sun, I venture in my big backyard garden and take a look at the beautiful plants doing their thing. My wife and I are growing a wide range of herbs like dill, basil, mint and plenty of vegetables like tomatoes and cucumbers. Over the past few years, it's become one of my favorite things to do, and encourage anyone to get into home gardening.

But this morning, I was especially excited because the cherry tomatoes had really started to ripen to an almost perfect red and I was eager to pick some and taste them today.

To my surprise, a bird seems to have made his way into our garden and snatched a good number of my cherry tomatoes and all I could find was this very small one on the ground as evidence that "beaks" had been poking holes in tomatoes and making off with their organic booty!

To show the size of the cherry tomato I found on the ground, I picked a fresh blackberry off the vine and held it in my hand for comparison.

Cherry tomato picture:



Our garden is fenced in and made so any thing with legs can't really get in and steal things, but its hard to keep birds out, so we let them take what they want and what they leave we eat. LOL

The taste of a fresh cherry tomato picked fresh off the vine from your backyard is as wonderful as the sweet and sour flavor of an organic blackberry just picked off the vine still moist with dew.

Red Salsa

So me and my wife have been making a lot of red salsa "salsa roja" lately trying to get it just the way we like it. And after today's red salsa, I think we have just about nailed it! We've been making this stuff for years, but it takes years to reach perfection!

Despite being unable to find "habaneros" I was able to find all the stuff we needed to make a true, authentic, mexican red salsa. Having lived in Los Angeles so many years, I can tell when salsa is missing something, or if it has that terrible ingredient, "vinegar" in it. Salsa should never have vinegar in it, and this is why I am turned off by all store bought salsas. They all contain vinegar as preservative and I do not like the flavor, it destroys the good flavor of the tomatoes and the chilis begin to taste "pickled" except for the lack of dill flavor.



So anyway... back to the salsa. Here is a picture of the finished salsa and we got the color perfect, the viscosity is just right, and the hot is perfect. Although I would have enjoyed it almost ridiculously hot with habaneros, the peppers we used were almost just right.

We used Anaheim Chilis, Jalapenos, and some other chilis that I am not aware of the name as the store had them simply called "hot peppers." They were long and tapered, they were nowhere near as hot as habanero, but the flavor came out great.

I know you can't taste it via the internet, but man oh man, I know you can tell it is quite tasty. It has garlic, cilantro, chilis, multiple types of tomatoes including roma and locally grown "Creole Tomatoes" and more.