I don’t. Yet.
I have the OXO hand cranked version. It’s pretty great.
I’ve used it on peppers, carrots, zucchini and squash. Does a pretty admirable job with all three.
Side note:
Sometimes for breakfast, I’ll spirilize a zucchini. Then, I heat some olive oil in a skillet, add a dollop of Chili-Garlic paste, and sauté the “noodles” in that. Nest them on a plate, then cook an egg sunny side up and place it on top. It’s a pretty (calorically) responsible and delicious breakfast.
This weekend I turned 23 pounds of tomatoes into 14 half pint jars of thick tomato sauce. They came from an old man on the side of a rural highway, which is almost as nice as having grown them but with less work.
Monday night I made garlic-basil chicken with tomato butter sauce (not dairy butter, but the partly congealed tomato) with ripe roma tomatoes and oh wow, what a bold, fresh flavour. I wonder if it’s too late to learn canning and try it this week.
Also: I am trying fermenting. I’m using Timothy Ferriss’ 4-Hour Chef recipe for sauerkraut. If that one doesn’t work out I’m upgrading to Nourishing Traditions sauerkraut recipe.
Canning is pretty easy, as long as your are putting up something sufficiently acidic (tomatoes are) and you don’t have any kind of oil or fat in the jars. When you do meat or fat, or non-acid items, you need to pressure can. That’s not exceptionally difficult either but you need a pretty pricey pressure canner with a gauge.
I did my first few canning sessions using only the info in a book from Ball, but there are a ton of sites with good instructions. It’s way easier if you have the great big pot, the basket and all the accessories, but as long as you have a large pot and a way to safely get the extremely hot jars out of the boiling water, you don’t absolutely need all the stuff.
Tomatoes and jam are the easiest things to put up. Plus, home made jam is a great present, inexpensive but impressive.
I also enjoy fermenting, but I’m pretty meh on sauerkraut. My favorite thing to ferment is hot sauce, or onions and garlic. They’re Zippy!
With my household all doing Weight Watchers type stuff, I’ve been striving to cook low-fat, low-calorie, low-carb, all of that sort of thing. Two easy recipes I’ve sort of made up on the fly have become favorites:
Mexican Spaghetti (I dunno what to call this)
Sautee a chopped up onion with some chopped up garlic until it’s browned. Put it in a blender along with about 1/2 can of chipotles in adobo (adjust for your desired heat level) and a 28-oz can of crushed tomatoes, seasoned with salt, oregano, cumin, and smoked paprika. Blend until smooth, set aside.
Dice pork loin or chops, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and sear on one side until browned (just put them in a pan & don’t touch for a few minutes) along with whatever veggies you want – mushrooms, bell peppers, squash, onion. Simmer with the sauce on low until pork is cooked through and tender. Stir in cilantro. Serve atop spiralized chayote squash “noodles” that’ve been boiled for a few minutes until tender.
Greek (?) chicken
Get a few jars of marinated artichoke hearts. Pour off the liquid into a bowl or ziploc bag and add chicken breasts or thighs, marinate for an hour or so. Arrange the chicken on a baking sheet, season well with salt, pepper, oregano, chopped garlic, and lemon juice, and add the artichoke hearts on top. Roast it under the oven broiler for about 8 minutes on each side or until the chicken’s cooked through and the artichokes have some char on them. Sprinkle well with crumbled feta, roast for another minute, serve. Add more lemon and a bit of chopped mint or parsley if you feel fancy.
Ooooh, I had not thought of this, but it sounds great. Better than zucchini!
Ooh, yes, that looks great!
I’ve become a big fan of chayote! No seeds, no core, no rind. Spiralized & boiled or sautéed, stays firm, nice bite & flavor, doesn’t get soggy like zucchini.
Alternatives in case of catastrophe:
Ooh, thank you!
Today, I made this:
2 naga jolokias, 1.5 scorpions, 1 Malaysian goronong (for local flavour), 1 onion, a handful of orange tomatoes, white vinegar, 4 cloves of garlic, smoked paprika, cayenne pepper, ground coriander seeds, the juice of one lime, salt, pepper and a little sugar.
Fried off the onions and garlic with some salt, added in the chopped chillis, fried together for a few minutes (and tried not to choke on the fumes), blended with the other ingredients, simmered for half an hour.
It’s delicious and scarily spicy. I’m trying desperately to come up with some sort of excuse to get my friends to try it. They’re a bit… wary of my hot sauces but I’m sure they’ll enjoy it. More importantly, I will definitely enjoy watching their reactions to it… 
I need this in my life
I had to open all the windows, put the hood fan on full and blast a standing fan into the kitchen just to be able to fry it off.
Last time I played around with scorpions without taking proper precautions, my hands were burning for three days. I decided to chop one up without wearing gloves on the Sunday and despite trying to wash it off with soap, oil, water, salt, nail varnish remover, and peanut butter, I ate a pastry on Wednesday and my mouth was tingling with capsaicin.
This time round, I got through three pairs of gloves, deliberately tried to contain any cross contamination and there are still one or two patches of skin on my hand that are tingly. Scorpions don’t mess about.
Yep. Being able to breathe would certainly be a problem. I don’t have an overhead oven, just one below the range, so I have no hood fan, plus I have breathing problems of my own. Last time I made a sauce with vodka and ghost pepper, I was having a little trouble breathing, but the vodka added to the fumes. I suppose if you were to cook the peppers without generating a lot of fumes, it would be more manageable. For example, if you sauteed them in butter or even fried them dry. Then again, with spiciness like that, you would still need the hood vent.
An N95 mask seems to be good enough to filter out airborne capsaicin but the haze isn’t bad enough this year that my local convenience store was selling them and my last one got pretty manky so I threw it out.
You might want to look into getting one though, if you have respiratory problems and want to cook with chillis…
Where do you (and other pepperheads who make crazy hot sauces) get ahold of these sorts of exotic peppers? I’d love to try this kind of thing, but despite exotic produce markets all around me, the best I can do is Thai chiles or habanero.
At the moment, I’m lucky enough to have a supermarket locally that sells crazy chillis but I also ordered a bunch from http://chilliseedbank.com.au that are still growing. I’ve been genuinely impressed by their germination rates (80-90%, depending on the spiciness of the strain) and would definitely recommend them.
Growing plants is incredibly therapeutic; I currently have a couple of hundred seedlings (from chillibank and ones grown from seeds taken from the supermarket chillis, though I’m not sure how viable these will be) growing on my balcony. They should fruit by the end of the year, and I’d be more than happy to post out seeds to good homes if anyone wants them…
ETA: Carolina reapers, scorpions, naga jolokias (also chocolate nagas), goronong, habanero, anchos and some weird tomato looking peppers I couldn’t identify. I’ll see how they go and offer out seeds to people here if and when they are available. Really though, chilliseedbank is amazing…
Oh nice! And now I recall you posting about your chili growing, I’d forgotten.
I spent quite a bit of time over the past two years clearing yard space and trying to grow various herbs and veggies, but the neighborhood bunnies have made gardening pretty much impossible. If there’s one thing I don’t have much of, it’s windowsill/balcony space for plants, but it’s something I’ve been considering doing some carpentry around. Then again, I have a large basement and there’s a bunch of hydroponics stores nearby…
Hydro all the way, son! Whitefly is a pain in the arse and if I felt comfortable about buying a bunch of hydro kit in Singapore, I’d definitely grow indoors… 
ETA: I use “son” as a general term of non gender specific endearment:)
