I successfully ground a bumper crop of peppers

By successfully, of course, I mean without suffering any "ill effects." More on that below. Having already turned a bunch of this year's ridiculous crop of hot peppers into hot sauce, I finally turned this past weekend to deal with the absurd amount of peppers I dried over the course of the harvest. It was a lot of peppers:

 

That's two grocery bags full of dried peppers. It's a lot. So, I went over to Farmer Tom's to take advantage of Mrs. Farmer Tom's excellent food processor and outdoor deck (can't do this stuff indoors) and commenced to grinding. First, of course, you destem them:

Put the properly destemmed peppers in the food processor and have at it:

You will wear surgical gloves during this process, and you will not touch any other part of your body until your are finished or have removed your gloves. "Pepper dick" is real, and very painful. Search the blog for that phrase -- it hurts too much for me to even provide the link to that post.

Anyway, having taken the appropriate precautions, grind away:

I actually had an inadequate supply of shaker bottles on hand, so I filled the six I had with the ground pepper:

Put the labels on, and the shakers were ready to be Christmas presents. And, of course, that quart jar full of ground pepper will fill a pretty good number of additional shaker bottles:

Not a bad afternoon's work. Of course, that "afternoon" started in March, but it was a fine and rewarding culmination of a long growing and harvesting season. Now, finally, we are done until, oh, March, I'd say.