Using It: Garlic, Onion and Pepper Jelly

Also known as Confetti Jelly in my house. Why? Because I can only write so much on the top of a canning jar lid. It is a quite tasty version of the traditional pepper jelly which has had onions and garlic added to the mix.

A different angle on Pepper Jelly

I decided to start a category of “Using It” because after you have put up jar after jar of various food stuffs – at some point  you need to consume them. There are always obvious ways of eating things: tomato sauce into spaghetti, jelly on toast, salsa on chips yadda, yadda, yadda … But sometimes you get bored.

And sometimes you are sick of the same-ole, same-ole.

And sometimes you run out of blackberry jam.

Then you start thinking to yourself – I have an entire shelf in my cabinet with various jams and jellies. You consider the peach, fig and orange-thyme-coriander. And then you have a crazy thought – Thai peanut sauce. Thai peanut sauce has peanuts, garlic, onions and peppers in it, the flavors meld well.

I know, crazy. But I am willing to throw myself off this particular cliff for y’all.

Just to prove I did it!

You know what? It was delicious. It was a savory PB&J with a little spicy kick in every other bite. It was an adult PB&J. I let my husband have a bite just to make sure that I wasn’t completely crazy. He was quite skeptical, but with one bite I won him over. I don’t know if I will be able to go back to regular jelly. Luckily I have about 4 more pints of this stuff.

I tried to take an interesting picture of it, really I did.

This delicious jelly is not a creation of my own, but from a recipe I found on the GardenWeb forums when I had two sacks full of banana peppers in my ‘fridge. Luckily GardenWeb has a wonderful archive and you can find it for yourself: Gina’s Onion, Garlic & Pepper Jelly. I personally used a combination of Banana Peppers and Jalapeno’s for the 1 1/2 C of chopped peppers. Another substitution I made was using red onions.

The jar of jelly that my hubster had opened was labeled “mild” which meant that there was 1/4 C of jalapenos in the mix. You can up the spicy pepper quotient to your heart’s desire. In the original post Gina suggests using the jelly as a glaze when roasting chicken and I must tell you that works great as does glazing pork loin. I canned it in pints – but in retrospect should have done 1/2 pints so that it was easier to give some away. Somehow only having 6 pints made me stingy, where if I had 12  1/2 pints I would have distributed them like mad.

Do y’all have any other ideas what I could do with this jelly?