Cookaholics Bulletin Board

...and maybe a couple others, as well!

Here are the Lombak peppers I harvested off of just two plants yesterday!


And here's a new one this season - Spanish Padron. Seems that it might be a variety of hot Spanish Paprika, as it is thin fleshed, and dried very well. Only grew one plant, as I got the seeds free, in a trade, but it is productive, and seems to be indeterminate, with flowers, as well as all different sized fruits on it.


And the last of the three mild ones, and another new one for me - Numex Sadia. Hot for a Numex, but only about 5K, and it is very productive - all of these off of just two plants, with many more green ones left to turn!


I'll have to try these new ones in Thai curry pastes, to see how they compare to store-bought Numex, which, so far, has been my favorite, though I always have to add some Thai dragons or similar peppers for heat.

So, our back yard is pretty shaded; maybe 1/2 sun or a little less. Greens do great, but any flowering plant tends to suffer. Any delicious peppers that actually like shade?

A half a day might be ok for many of the peppers I grow, though they may be a little less productive. I only get about 70%, since it comes up from behind a house behind me, then goes behind mine later on. Add this to the fact that I cover these mild peppers, and others prone to pepper maggots, with a fabric that blocks about 10% of the light, yet the plants under the fabric get even bigger! And one year (2003?) we had a TERRIBLE year with rain, when it was cloudy almost constantly, and peppers were the only flowering plant that grew in my garden! The small, Thai type peppers seem to grow through anything.

Dave,

Yay Lombak! Mainly I like them because they are very mild, which means I can actually serve them to my sweetie.

Padron peppers are meant to be eaten in the spring/early summer when they are small and green. You pan-fry them in olive oil with salt, and then serve the with drinks as a snack. The idea is that they're a sort of "capsicum roulette" when small and green, most of them are sweet but 1 in 8 or so is hot (by Iberian definitions of hot). They're also quite tasty.

I've never had a ripe red one.

Steve just harvested a whole bunch of banana peppers. All are nice and big, some yellow, some green and some red, all from the same plant. He plans to pickle them, so if anyone has a great recipe, I'd love to see it. Not sure what else to do with the banana peppers.

We also have several huge cucumbers (made great Thai cucumber soup). I saw this recipe in Saveur for a slaw without cabbage using cucumbers instead. Cucumber-Pepper-Slaw. Thinking of subbing the Habanero with Cubanelle since I don't care for a lot of heat and maybe the jalapeno with a banana one.