Grace McHenry likes food with a kick.
"Anything with peppers in it, I like it, " the 91-year-old Dallas woman giggled.
She jokes that her back yard is a sort of a jalapeno factory.
From habaneros to the ghost pepper, McHenry grows them all, and she uses them to make jalapeno jelly.
"I just enjoy doing it and giving it away," she said. "Everybody said you should start selling it. If they want to buy it, fine, but if they don't, I just give it away."
It takes about an hour-and-a-half to make six half-pint jars of her jelly.
And as it simmers on the stove, old memories bubble up.
Local
The latest news from around North Texas.
"I guess I was 5 or 6, when my mother would go milk the cows at night and my job was to fix dinner," McHenry remembered. "I had to stand on a stool to reach the oven – so they tell me, I don't remember that at all."
Her hot jelly has grown quite a reputation.
"My son said, 'Mother, you need to enter your jelly in the state fair,'" she recalled. "I said, 'I don't want to do that.' And he said, 'I think you should.'"
So she did. And this year she won first place, a blue ribbon.
"I couldn't believe it," McHenry said. "I looked at that and thought, is that really true?"
"Her jelly definitely stood out above everyone else's," said local chef Robert Lyford, who helped judge the jellies. "It was a good balance of sweet and spicy and neither one was too over powering."
A bottle of McHenry's jelly is now on display in the Creative Arts building at the State Fair of Texas.
The fair offers more than 1,100 categories for Texans to enter, everything from jelly to jewelry.
The public praise is nice, but for McHenry, it's just a way to pass time.
"It's something I love to do," she said.
