 Hello and welcome to Little Garden on the Prairies. Today we are in the Little Garden kitchen and we have just picked some sweet banana peppers from the garden and we are going to make a recipe. I like to call a sweet and spicy one jar pickled recipe. So if you've seen on my channel, I have a few other one jar recipes. I really like just making one jar at a time because usually when you're harvesting from your garden, a small garden like me, I don't get a whole bunch of stuff at one time. So it's just easy to just whip up one jar. I'm gonna show you how you can easily measure up your water and vinegar so that you don't have any excess. And we will just go through everything you need. So this is some of the sweet banana peppers that I harvested yesterday off of one plant. So we are going to use them to hopefully fill one mason jar. This is the size I'm gonna use. We will see once we cut them up. If that's going to fill it, I think it should. You start off with your basic ingredients here to make your brine which is vinegar, water, some pickling salt and sugar. Some people don't choose sugar but I wanna have a little bit of a sweet flavor in this so I'm gonna use sugar. Then when it comes to your other ingredients it's really up to you what you wanna put in if you're a garlic person like we are I'm going to be putting one crushed garlic clove into the jar. I have these pickling spices I just bought in bulk. I'm not exactly sure what's all in there but I'm gonna use some of those. And then this is going to be what's gonna give my pickled peppers some heat. I'm gonna use some red pepper flakes. So if you're not a heat person you can leave that out if you have some fresh dill which I wish I did. You could add that, make it kind of a dill flavor. I have a variety of different spices here, mustard seed, dill seed, celery seed. So really it's up to you what you want to put in as far as your spices. Before I start cutting up the peppers and putting them into the jar I'm gonna start off by just crushing this garlic giving it a squash and putting it in the bottom of my jar. So this is some fresh garlic that I just harvested from my garden about a week ago. So I'm gonna put that in the bottom. So when you cut these up I'm gonna be just doing these inter-rings just starting at the end. About half inch thick size. And as you get closer to the top you will start hitting some seeds. Doesn't matter if there's a few seeds in your pickles but you wanna try and get rid of most of them. You can just cut the top off and slice those out. A bit finicky but just take that whole piece out and then just slice them up in these half inch rings. So I haven't even tasted these yet I just thought I should give them a try fresh and they are really good. They got that sweet taste kind of similar to like a bell pepper. That's a nice crunch to them. So these are what we would call a refrigerator pickle recipes. So these aren't gonna be processed in a water bath. They won't be able to seal them and put them in the cupboard or pantry. You would have to keep these in the fridge. And then they should be probably eaten up within a month or two. So I've cut up all the peppers that I've had here. It doesn't quite fill this jar but that's okay because we're gonna just fill it up as high as we need it just to cover it all. Have more peppers, obviously you could jam a lot more in here than what I've got today but this is all I've got for my harvest so this is gonna be what we work with today. So I usually mix up a 50-50 vinegar water brine for my pickling. So what I'm gonna do here so you don't end up with any extra brine is I'm going to use the jar here and just take some filtered water that I got from our fridge and fill it halfway with water, just eyeballing it here. Then I'm just gonna fill it the rest of the way up over top of the pickles with vinegar. And then that way you know you're going to have just the right amount to cover it up once you've made the brine. So from there I'm just going to pour that into the pot now. We're gonna heat up this brine, add all of our spices to it and then it'll be ready to pour over the peppers. So I'm gonna do one teaspoon each of the pickling salt and the sugar. As far as the spices I'm just kind of eyeballing it making my own measurements here but I think with the pickling spices I'll also just do a generous teaspoon. Try to get a little bit of all those different things that are in this mixture. Black pepper corns are something that I didn't mention at the beginning but a scoop of those is always good too. And now it's time for the heat. So this can be a little dangerous if you don't really know how hot it's gonna get. I use these red peppers in chili and stuff and it doesn't seem to take very much to add heat so I'm going to be a little conservative here and just add a quarter teaspoon of the red pepper flakes. Now you could, if you find, after you've tasted them after a couple of days, if you find that they're not very hot then you could sprinkle some more of it into the brine, let it sit in the fridge and heat up a little bit more. So a quarter teaspoon, we'll see how it goes. I'm just gonna bring this to a slow simmer just to make sure that salt and sugar are well dissolved in here and then we will be ready to pour it over our peppers. Okay, so our spicy brine is already here to pour over the peppers. I got a spoon here as well, I wanna make sure we get as many of those spices in the jar as we can. Scrape them all in there. So I'm just gonna let this cool to room temperature and then put them in the fridge. So you can pretty much eat these right away but I would recommend leaving them for a couple of days just to really let all those spices and garlic blend in and add flavor to those peppers. So it has been about a week since I made my pickled banana peppers here and as you can see we've been working our way through the jar pretty fast. We've been enjoying them in salads, we've had them in a taco dish and today I'm just having them on the side here with some sandwiches. So they are still really nice and crunchy and I have to say the heat level is pretty good. I use that quarter teaspoon of red peppers. These peppers have a nice mild heat to them. Depends on your heat level but I don't like it too crazy hot. So a quarter teaspoon is pretty much perfect to make a nice mildly hot pepper. So I hope you enjoyed watching my video and if you have got just a few peppers out of your garden or even if you buy them at the market garden somewhere make yourself a one jar batch of pickled peppers. They're delicious. So thank you for watching. Please leave a comment, hit that like button and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on future videos coming to the channel. Thanks for watching.