Hmmm. Strange things, these blogs.
A good way to communicate with the known and the unknown.
A good way to weave a tale of the ordinary...
...or jazz it up to the extraordinary (or silly in my case).
Greetings, oh ye who read these exerpts of a muddled mind!
I humbly welcome you to the World of AJI CHOMBO.
Bit of a dreamer, bit of a vegetating, vegetative vegetable...
... one heck of a spicy fruit!
So what is this blog going to be about? Well, for starters, it's about that strange little fruit, the Capsicum. It's a journal that wilL attempt to chronicle my success (or more likely resounding failure), as I strive to grow chillies from seed to pod. Along the way, I may digress from all matters capsicum into the shennanigans that envelop my rather ordinary life, and that of my partner-in-shennanigans, Almapaprika. She's a sweet pepper, Almapaprika (I love her lots. She puts up with me.). Got more common sense than me, and can be a little odd sometimes (though definitely not the strangest pepper I know).
But I digress... (yeah, it starts like this most of the time. One random thought turns into a ten volume diatribe).
Before I start, though, I do have a confesion to make.
I am not a chilehead (or chillihead, if you prefer the brit spelling of the term). Yes, it does make it all the more 'curious', that I'm not ga-ga about the little things, and yet I strive to grow them.
I decided a few years back to give it a try with some chillies (and a couple o'sweet peppers bought from the supermarket, and lo and behold! I actually got plants that grew big and strong and rewarded me and Almapaprika with chillies and peppers (she ate the peppers, I just grew them).
Much like my goings off-tangent in this blog, in real life I couldn't leave well enough alone, and attempted to grow myriads of little capsicums in a rather limited back garden, encroaching on the gardening space of one of our flatmates, Chiltepin, who was growing runner beans and beetroots. Her other peppery half at the time, Chilipiquin (look, if you know what these chillies look like, it will make perfect sense to you), brought me some chillies from China. I then bought chillies from three separate seed suppliers. But I overdid it, and was only able to harvest the two I mentioned previously, and some Cherry Chillies from another plant that grew beautifully in the kitchen windowsill. That house had an absolutely fantastic kitchen windowsill for growing plants! I will have to find the CD with the photos I took of those chillies to show y'all how utterly fantastic it was.
But that pretty much set up this current fascination for capsicums, and Scoville Heat Units, and the wonderful menagerie of terminolgies so preciously utilised by Chilliheads.
Almapaprika and I even began buying chilli sauces and jams to try.
I have to admit, to date, the absolutely BEST (and I say this after tasting at least four or five different ones) Chipotle Chilli Jam we've tasted has been courtesy of chillis galore. It was slighlty smoky, with just the right amount of sweetness and just the right amount of heat. We would use it for yummy cheese on toast, every time. Worth every penny, in this pepper's honest opinion (plus they were extremely nice when my order got lost in the post).
But again, I digress! (this gets to be a pattern, folks.)
Two years later, the chilli bug pinched me again, and I've now decided to do a little bit more (and true to form, I've once again overdone it!).
But I will let you digest this first entry before getting to the nitty-gritty of it all:
Aji Chombo's Chillies for 2009!
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