Part 1: Chili Plant

Back in July, I got Stefan two chilli plants for his birthday. Did you know, we have the exact same birthday? Same day and year. We are maybe two hours apart. When we first met and found that out, we calculated the chances and it was something like 1 in 6000. Pretty crazy right? I don't know if I believe much in horoscopes and astrology but we do have similar personality traits and I wonder if it's the birthday.  We have teachers in both our families, family in Austria and Poland (so nearby) and both went to French school. For a couple years after university,  I lived with Keldi in a house diagonally behind Stefan's family home. We had a few friends in common, but never met. I'm surprised our paths hadn't crossed sooner, but glad that they finally did :)

We have both taken an interest in photography in the last few years. Stefan is really talented. We woke up early yesterday and decided to go check out these stromatolite fossils over on the Quebec side of the Island Park bridge. I had been before, but forgotten how beautiful it is there.

Anyway, back to the birthday and the chilis. I had seen a chilli plant in the market and went back early one morning with Daniele to sneakily buy it, but the stand was closed. I could see the plant but it was fenced in..hmm what to do? Well luckily we found another booth that was open and had some other types of chillies and I decided to get a hot chilli plant and a Hungarian chilli plant.

I always call them chilli peppers, but Stefan is advising me that it's wrong..they are not peppers, just chillies. He says it's a taxonomy error.. hmm.  Regardless of the name, Stefan really liked them, and it was a gift that kept on giving. Because we don't get much sun on our balcony and were heading off to Europe, we asked Stefan's parents if we could keep them in their garden. Stefan's mom is a wonderful gardener, and I'm not sure what she did, but the plants flourished and we got so many chillies! It was a lovely surprise to see about 40 of them on the plants.

Back in July 

Beginning of October 

Stay tuned for Part 2 on pickling.