Stuffed Peppers

Mucho Caliente.

See, I can speak some Spanish. Actually, I studied it the first time I was in college and found it a very nice language to learn, as opposed to French, which I enjoyed, but Spanish was more beautiful sounding to me. This is why no one related to me reads this blog, I can't just tell the story, I have to go on and on with side details. I can't help it. This is how I talk. I like to give the back ground first, but in this case whether I studied Spanish or not is completely irrelevant to the rest of the story as I remember it.

It is pepper season. I went to the Farmer's Market one day, walked past a bin of peppers and inhaled the most wonderful scent. I paused, "What is that wonderful smell?" I found a bag of roasted peppers with the display and held it up to my nose and breathed in the warm pepper scent. It was delightful. I thought, "I wonder how people use these peppers?" I have never cooked with them before. I know my friend makes green chili so I decided to ask her, and later she told me everything I needed to know to be make all sorts of use out of those wonderful roasted peppers. It is a new avenue in cooking I have to explore.

Now, my brother, at one of our bbq's, made stuff jalapenos. Actually, they were kind of like jalapeno poppers you might get at a restaurant. It was a very simple recipe: half the jalapenos, discard the seeds, fill with garden veggie, or chive and onion cream cheese, wrap with bacon and bake at 350 for 45 minutes to an hour, those at sea level may need adjust the cooking time on that. Anyway, just watch 'em and cook the bacon all the way. They are pretty yummy. My husband loves them.

The last time he was home he asked that we make some of these stuffed peppers, and we carted off to the store to get the 3 ingredients. There we stood in the produce section analyzing the jalapeno peppers. I grabbed a plastic bag and began grabbing and throwing the peppers in the bag. There were 4 baskets of them, so I proceeded to pick and choose the best peppers from each basket. My husband said, "Whoa, hold on a minute there, those say they are habanero peppers" I looked at the sign, and said, "No, those are jalapenos, they must just have it labelled wrong, we're fine."

As soon as we got home we began assembling the peppers. My husband began slicing and removing the innards, and I reminded him, "Don't touch your face or your eyes, or you will seriously regret it, oh, and your hands will probably burn for the rest of the day." At one point I saw him at the sink throwing water on his face, his eyes were watering, and his whole face looked distorted, his nose started running, and I said, "You touched your face didn't you?" He shook his head yes, and continued to water. It eventually calmed down for him, and we cooked our peppers.

Now, we had made these things on two other occasions, and every thing was fine, but this time was different. My husband took one huge bite out of a pepper and got a very strange look on his face. "These are really hot" he said. "Uh oh, do you think we might have got the habanero peppers after all?" I wondered. "I don't know, maybe it was just a really hot one." He thought.
I decided to risk it and took a cautious bite out of one of the peppers, my mouth was immediately engulfed in flames. "Oh my gosh, fire just shot across my tongue, I think we must have grabbed the habanero peppers." We both started laughing at our mistake, and decided we would try a few more since we had gone to so much trouble to make all of these darn things. We simultaneously each stuck a whole pepper in our mouths, and chewed them up, and that is when things got really bad. We were in excruciating pain. We asked our 12 year old to drive us to the hospital, but she refused. We laughed at our foolishness and imagined the doctors in the E.R. when we came busting through the doors with our mouths bleeding, and our 12 year old parking the car.

Well, we couldn't really eat them. They were scary hot for us, and we tried to eat them, but we both kept thinking, which ones are habaneros and which one are jalapenos? We just couldn't tell because we are ignorant in the way of peppers, and so I called my friend again, and she told me, "Habaneros don't look like jalapenos, they are sort of an orangish color!" Man, did I ever feel stupid. We were eating jalapenos all along, but they were particularly hot at least to our tongues. No, it is probably because when we had made them before they were not a really hot bunch maybe because they weren't in season then, it just so happens the ones we bought this time had a lot more fire in them. You can never tell with a pepper I guess.

Yesterday we bought some more jalapenos to try it again, this time they actually had habanero peppers and they looked nothing like jalapenos. You live and you learn. We will make them today.