What to do when a friend unexpectedly drops off 3 dozen jalapeño peppers? Admittedly, this isn’t a terribly common problem, though when your friends are cooks who take on large-scale projects,  sometimes there are surplus ingredients on hand. Such was the case recently when Cathy Erway joined Karol and Frank and me for a small dinner party at my apartment, just days after the Hapa Kitchen Luau. When Cathy arrived she pulled three fat ziplock bags from her bag, and asked if I could use some jalapeños. They were shiny and plump and looked very fresh – they were organic peppers from the Garden of Eve Farm on Long Island — so I had no choice but to accept them. But what, I thought, am I going to do with 36 jalapeño peppers?

Soon though, Labor Day arrived, and with it came invitations to attend rooftop barbecues in the neighborhood. And with the barbecues came the idea to turn the jalapeño peppers into jalapeño poppers, one of my favorite bar snacks and a treat sure to please a crowd of beer-drinking Labor Day party-goers. After some persuasion, I recruited Karol to be my collaborator in this undertaking, and while I rinsed and dried the peppers she researched recipes:

“Make a T-shaped cut in each pepper and scrape out the seeds and veins.” This step sounded easy enough, though it proved to be a little painstaking, and a few peppers were sacrificed until I got the technique right. “Pipe a mixture of cream cheese and cheddar cheese into each pepper.” Pipe? Fortunately, ace cake decorator Karol had the gear for this task, and whipped up a tasty cheese filling spiked with smoked paprika to boot. “Bread the filled peppers in deep-fry hot oil until crispy.” No batter? Well then, this step would be familiar enough, requiring the familiar four-step assembly line of milk, flour, egg wash, and bread crumbs (actually, for the last step we combined bread crumbs with coarse corn meal).

This particular batch of peppers was fairly mild – garden-grown jalapeños can vary widely in their spiciness (as opposed to those you find in the supermarket, which seem to be bred to be nearly capsicum-free), but nonetheless we wore latex gloves when handling them since we had to process so many. We accompanied them with a smoky dipping sauce made from sour cream and the adobo sauce from a can of chipotles.

And the rest, as they say, is history – or at any rate, the poppers themselves quickly became history, as the party guests snatched them up and swallowed them down. They were delicious, and since there’s a good amount of cheese filling left over, I might just make them again for a barbecue coming up this weekend. Karol?

Read a recipe for jalapeño poppers here.

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