GREEN PEPPER LADY!

A while back, I did a post on “Funny Food Stories“.  There was a lot of response on Facebook and some great comments on the blog.  Just about everyone has a funny story about when they first learned to cook or about something to do with food.  Here is another one on me and how I became known as the green pepper lady!  If you are new or if you have been with me all along and have a story about yourself, leave me a comment on here and share your story with us! We may use it in a future post or newsletter.

I love green peppers!  I like to grow them, freeze them, eat them, use them in recipes and give them away!

Anyway, I started to think about when I used to live on the farm and my twins, Anne and Leigh, were very small. We raised a huge garden back then and by this time I knew how to cook.  I spent the entire summer making preserves, jams and jellies, and canning and freezing vegetables.  I did not let one thing on that farm go to waste!

The neighbors even started bringing me buckets of excess tomatoes.  A farmer down the road told me he had a plum-tree hanging full of plums and I could have them all if I picked them.  I made 53 pints of plum jelly!  Needless to say a lot of family got plum jelly for Christmas that year.   I was obsessed with using anything and everything edible one way or another.  There is an old expression that says, “he just fell off the turnip truck”.  I have heard that expression all my life.  It means someone is uninformed, naive, or gullible.  That kind of describes me in my younger days.

One morning, a neighbor stopped by our farmhouse and told me a semi truck had turned over about two miles up the road.  The truck was carrying green peppers! The entire trailer of this semi was filled with these huge green peppers.  The contents had spilled out into the field and a ditch alongside the road.  The neighbor told me they were trying to get people to come and take the green peppers.  I could not get into my little Chevy wagon fast enough to get some of those green peppers!  When I got to the wrecked truck, green peppers were everywhere!  Huge green peppers!  I had visions of stuffed peppers with hamburger, stir fry, etc.  Several people stopped and took a few and said that was all they wanted.  I filled up everything I had in the car that would hold a pepper.  Then, I drove home as fast as I could and got a box of garbage bags. I’m talking about those big green leaf bags.  I filled up as many as I could get in my car and stopped at neighbors houses on my way home to give them a bag of peppers!

I made several trips that day and I remember one lady down the road told me not to bring anymore of those peppers to her. She said she could not “handle another pepper” in no uncertain words!  I filled our freezer up with peppers and we ate peppers until we were sick to death of peppers but I still like them today and that has been years ago.

I would probably not go to such extremes today but I certainly had good intentions.  So, now you know how I got to be the “Green Pepper Lady” and how I saved as many green peppers as I could that day to keep them from lying in that field and rotting.  In a certain area of Kentucky where I lived at that time, I wonder if I am still remembered as the green pepper lady. lol.

Did you ever go overboard in a situation?  Do you have a similar story?  Want a great recipe using green peppers.  Check out this unstuffed green pepper skillet!

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