Aji Amarillo & The Last Rose of Summer

Peruvian Yellow Peppers, Electroculture and the Harvest Scramble

A little focal change-up as everyone in Western North Carolina reassembles their lives, from catastrophic to minor. Water and electric returned this week, but what emerges from the pipes remains miasmic and likely to run a tractor.

Fortuna smiled on us as our gardens and greenhouse were unfazed by mistress Helene. We had our best gardening year in over a decade, certainly due to implementing electroculture. For example, we never were able to grow eggplants, and we enjoyed dozens this summer. No flea beetles. Giant okra. No tomato blight. Here is Krys’ electroculture workshop. Electroculture is easy, relatively inexpensive, creative, and empowering.

Every year here in the mountains there is an early freeze, which was last night/this morning. Thus a scramble to pick all plants sensitive to cold. Something of an annual ritual. The day is always suffused with an icy biting wind. Electroculture purportedly ameliorates the effects of frost, and that seems to have been the case here.

Our favorite food truck, the Local Buggy, is run by a wonderful Peruvian woman, Katya, and serves traditional Peruvian marinated local chicken with a transcendent aji amarillo sauce. These yellow (ours are orange) peppers are mildly hot, often grow tall enough if staked so as not to need stooping to pick, and like most hot peppers, give you more than you can ever need. They also ripen indoors off the vine, which is nice as they ripen late here. There are a million recipes on line, most of them too complicated. Here is what I do.

Use gloves. If you don’t you will regret it. I have used plastic supermarket veggie bags in a pinch. Cut the tops, slit the peppers and remove the seeds with a spoon. Maybe find a couple of particularly large, gorgeous peppers and save the seeds for next year. Often the pepper with the best seeds for saving will present itself to you when you ask.

Blanch the peppers in a pot of boiling water until they start to soften. Pop them into a blender or food processor (terrible name, btw). Cover with an oil you can respect. We try to use olive oil made from actual olives, and stay away from industrial “vegetable” oil (which can also run a tractor, and also run a digestive tract). You can add in some of the blanch water also. Not giving amounts, as it will differ every time and vary for your gustatorial inclinations. Add queso cheese. Jack might work also. Some salt.

Then the secret ingredient: black mint leaves. Also known as huacatay. Best if you can grow it, and it freezes well. Apparently there commercial pastes available, but we have never tried them. Then blend the hades out of it, vitamix on high. It is not really thick, soupy like a chowder.

You can freeze some, but here it goes quickly: on chicken, eggs, fries for starters.

Top basket, ripe and soon-to-be-ripe aji amarillo peppers; bottom basket: large sweet peppers that we love to stuff, habañeros we make a sauce from, and the small red ones are a new discovery, Calabrians. Very very hot. Unusual in that they grow pointing up. We dehydrate the excessive effulgence of these and grind them.

Gardening lends a healing grounding “normalcy” to our days now.

Given the recent events here, this song, “Black Muddy River” by Robert Hart Hunter and Jerome Garcia, and its opening line (referenced in the title), comes to mind. Supposedly the last song Jerry performed. Here is a sweet version by Sierra Hull.

“When the strings of my heart start to sever, and stones fall from my eyes instead of tears.”

When the last rose of summer pricks my fingers
And the hot sun chills me to the bone
When I can't hear the song for the singer
And I can't tell my pillow from a stone

I will walk alone by the black muddy river
And sing me a song of my own
I will walk alone by the black muddy river
Sing me a song of my own

When the last bolt of sunshine hits the mountain
And the stars seem to splatter in the sky
When the moon splits the south west horizon
And scream of an eagle on the fly

I will walk alone by the black muddy river
And listen to the ripples as they moan
I will walk alone by the black muddy river
Sing me a song of my own

Black muddy river
Roll on forever
I don't care how deep and wide
If you got another side
Roll muddy river
Roll muddy river
Black muddy river, roll

When it seems like the night will last forever
And there's nothing left to do but count the years
When the strings of my heart start to sever
And stones fall from my eyes instead of tears

I will walk alone by the black muddy river
And dream me a dream of my own
I will walk alone by the black muddy river
Sing me a song of my own
And sing me a song of my own