At some point in my canning career, I might have thought of myself as person who preserves the bounty of locally grown foods at the height of their freshness while wearing attractive yet low-key jewelry and a simple apron. Faced with a cabinet of marmalade, dilly beans, cherry bourbon, and now hot pepper jelly*, however, it’s clear that my canning is basically about drinking and snack foods.

I hadn’t ever eaten hot pepper jelly, and I was suspicious of it until Kate told me that it was sort of an old lady food that you eat on a cracker with cream cheese. You’re going to think that it’s being undersold here. No. That is exactly what it is. But somehow, hot pepper jelly and cream cheese on a wheat thin fills some elemental hunger in my soul. I want to eat it all the time.

Kate’s already written about the recipe, and I’m not going to retype it. I’d never made anything with packaged pectin, and the whole process was pretty easy. The recipe included in the box, however, lacked a certain amount of detail and misstated the yield, which I thought was fine, but in hindsight I would very much have enjoyed an extra pint or two of hot pepper jelly. We also used less sugar than the recipe recommended and I’m happy with that decision. It’s still plenty sweet.

This is all to say that if you have any interest in canning, or cream cheese, I really highly recommend making hot pepper jelly.

I also want to mention that I recently borrowed Homemade Living: Canning and Preserving with Ashley English from the library here and highly recommend it for beginning canners. It doesn’t have a particularly extensive selection of recipes, but the description of the canning process and the rationale behind the different steps is both clearer and more in-depth than I’ve encountered in other canning books.

* Which is technically a jam, but now “hot pepper jelly” is ingrained in my head and I’m having trouble adopting the more accurate name.