Whether your taste runs toward a fiery jam to warm up your toast on chilly mornings or a crusty cornbread with colorful seasonal pods, the Chile Head Sampler Volume 1 can be your kitchen companion.

This user-friendly guide to cooking with chiles features more than 30 original recipes by Master Gardeners of Santa Clara County (of the University of California Cooperative Extension) in categories such as main dishes, sauces, dips, and preserves.

Within its 34 pages the handbook, first published in 2002 and currently in its third printing, also includes tips on how to extend the season by drying, smoking, marinating, barbecuing and freezing chiles.

The newest release, published by Master Gardeners of Santa Clara County, includes a section on how to grow chiles. Packaged in holiday colors of red, green and ivory, the chile book will spice up holiday gift baskets.

In easy-to-follow style, the master gardener chile book team carries out the volunteer organization?s mission of providing horticultural information and educating the public, in the Chile Head Sampler.

As in previous years, the Master Gardeners this year grew more than 40 varieties of rare chiles in their demonstration trials. Plants are sold at our annual Spring Garden Market.

How to get it!