I never took Latin in high school but if I did, I might know a better way to say "a hot pepper will singe your mouth." As it is, I'll stick to my best guess.
Anyway, here's an update on our prolific chile de arbol plant. It was giving us so many little red fiery chiles I had to do something with them or else I would risk spoilage before I had a chance to use them all. I contemplated pickling, which is certainly an easy and a worthy thing to do with peppers of all kinds but it required more work than I wanted to do at the time. The next best solution was to dry them. I knew that de arbol chiles took well to drying so all I needed was a needle and thread. I simply picked the ripe chiles and strung a needle and thin thread through the stem end. It is as simple as that. These are hanging over our kitchen sink area but are well out of the way of daily chores.
As you can see in the picture, the chiles are quite wrinkled already but they aren't quite dry enough to crush and crumble into a jar. When they are I will have my own jar of crushed red pepper for use in all kinds of dishes.
