Drying Peppers

So The Man of the House loves himself some hot peppers. The hotter the better! On a recent shopping trip, he picked up a whole bunch of habaneros. For those who have never tasted a habanero, let me tell you, these things are HOT. Habaneros are generally considered to be about 60 times hotter than jalapenos... Yikes!

What this basically means is that we had a big bag of hot peppers that no one in the house except for The Man was willing to eat. And there were far too many peppers for him to eat before they went bad. Since we are all about Simplicity and frugality, we don't like to waste food, so we went looking for the best way to preserve those peppers so The Man could enjoy every last one of them.

We ended up settling on drying the peppers. I washed them all and set them on a baking rack, which I put into a very low oven. I do have a food dehydrator, but I didn't feel like taking it out since I had another project going on the counter that day. So the ol' oven it was.

I did notice that some of them dried faster than others, so if you try this at home, be sure to watch them carefully. I did pull some out sooner, once they seemed done enough, and left the rest in to finish up. Once they were all dry, I put them in a jar for storage.

The Man has been known to open this jar, and just bite right into one of these. Crazy, I tell you!