Pickled Hot Cherry Peppers

This is an adaptation of a number of recipes we have seen on the web.

Ingredients
For each quart of peppers,
3 cups white vinegar
1 cup water
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 large clove of garlic
1 large bay leaf
1/2 teaspoon black peppercorns
2 spring of fresh oregano (or some dried leaves) 

Wash peppers but do  not remove stems or seeds.
Pierce each pepper several times with a sharp knife toward the top.
In order to determine how much of the other ingredients is needed, stuff peppers snugly into a wide-mouth quart canning jar and add a few extra to allow for shrinkage.Then put the peppers aside.

Now wash enough wide-mouth quart canning jars for all the peppers and put them in a hot water bath.
Put the jar lids in a separate hot water bath.

For each quart of peppers, mix 3 cups white vinegar and 1 cup water.
Add 1/1/2 teaspoon of canning salt per qt of peppers and bring the mixture to a rolling boil.
Put about two quarts of peppers into the pot.
When the vinegar solution returns to a rolling boil, set a timer for 4 minutes.

While the peppers are boiling, remove the hot jars from the water bath and add as many of the following ingredients as you wish to each jar:
1 large garlic clove, cut in half
1 large bay leaf
1/2 teaspoon of black peppercorns
a sprig of fresh o regano (or some dried leaves)

When the four minutes are finished, remove the peppers from the pot and stuff them in the jars.
Fill each jar with vinegar solution to within 1/2 inch of rim.

Repeat the process of boiling peppers until all the peppers are done. It is important to do this as quickly as possible so that the filled jars stay hot.

Add addional vingegar solution to each jar as needed to keep the level of the vinegar solution withn 1/2 inch of rim. Now wipe the jar rims with a paper towel and seal the jars.

Then put the sealed jars in the hot-water bath and boil for 20 minutes.