One of the downsides of working far too much of late is that I don't have much time to do my own cooking (or cleaning or laundry or exercise or sleep or pretty much anything really). Apparently, I don't have time to do much reading either.
A case study. After a particularly "active" Friday--with a highly able colleague, I organized and hosted a conference for 75 professionals at which I should add the bitching was kept to a minimum (no easy feat, that)--I decided to have a very quiet evening at home. After a three-hour nap.
The night before I had finally managed to get to the local Giant Eagle to stock up on groceries, yet another task that had been too long ignored. Because it has been a very busy couple of months, I have relied a bit on easy-to-prepare or already prepared foods in order to get the sustenance I need. For the most part, I think I've chosen wisely--fish and chicken, along with vegetables, although I did have a couple of weeks of a dangerous liaison with lamb chops, not the lightest of red meats to be sure. And I've finally decided that I cannot be trusted with Nutella anywhere in my vicinity, so hopefully no more simple dinners of "a delicious hazlenut spread with just a hint of cocoa" straight out of the jar for me.
But Nutella and lamb are not vegetables. At the grocery store, I felt a rather desperate need for something from the vegetable layer of the now-debunked food pyramid. As luck would have it (or not, dear reader, or not!), the "Iggle" had stuffed peppers for sale in the prepared food section!
While I consider myself very much an omnivore, I have never been a huge fan of peppers, stuffed or otherwise. Peppers, like onions, just seem to me to be one of those "polyester of vegetables" (to paraphrase John Waters), the kind of vegetable that gets applied to every fast-food dish, mainly because it's cheap and, in theory, flavorful. Me, I just find peppers and onions cheap, bitter, and gassy.
A bit like myself at the moment, come to think of it.
Nevertheless, there are exceptions. Who can deny the deliciousness of a Vidalia sweet onion? I've become a big fan of pepperoncini, now that I live in Pennsylvania, the Italy of the Mid-Atlantic, where pepperoncini show up in all kinds of places, my favorite being the really simple mozzarella, prosciutto, and pepperoncini rolls you sometimes find in the cheese section. Creamy, salty, hammy, and then a definite bite. And what's not to like about the occasional piquant prick to the tastebuds?
I also recently had the delicious joy of sampling some stuffed peppers made by my friend, the Glass Artist, who, using an old family recipe, prepared these amazing cubanelles filled with a stuffing made of bread and Italian seasonings, moistened with olive oil, then baked in the oven with homemade tomato sauce. One of the simplest, most delicious foods I've had the pleasure of knowing since coming back East in 2004. The peppers were mild, the sauce tangy, the stuffing moist and savory.
Here in the prepared food aisle, it looked like they had stuffed cubanelles, too, filled with a stuffing made of Italian sausage, rather than bread, but still, cubanelles. I picked up a can of tomato sauce, figuring I'd mix it with some diced tomatoes, flavored with basil and garlic. What a perfect Friday night treat after a long, brutal week!
Now I'll admit to having lost my spicy food edge since leaving Texas and no longer making regular pilgrimages to Mexico, with its fire-down-below, good-for-what-ails-you, chile-based cuisine. There's really very little decent Mexican food in Western Pennsylvania, the Land of the Hallowed Pierogi, Mexican immigrants obviously being smart enough to avoid an area where the sun shines less on average than Seattle. Not that I can't appreciate pierogies, haluski, and other local faves, but they are on the mild and filling side of the food spectrum, to say the least.
But the fire factor of the pepper I first bit into was something else entirely, historic and otherworldly in its intensity and strength, the Godzilla of peppers, born of an atomic bomb-induced mutation. One would need to use the Kelvin scale to properly record its thermodynamic quality.
OK, I thought, maybe I'm not eating this right. It's just me--my default position on practically everything that goes South-of-the-Border in my little life. Perhaps it was just the initial blast, I reasoned. I'll be fine after another bite.
No, worse! My tastebuds had already been seared off by the first bite. The second pepper-to-surface contact was made with my now slightly blistered lips and very raw tongue and was thus far, far worse.
So I'll eat some sausage filling, then come back to the pepper, I figured. Except now I couldn't taste the sausage. I went back to the pepper with predictably horrible results.
I think I gave up after some more sausage and the fourth or fifth bite. I finally looked more closely at the packaging--the labeling I had seen in the store had apparently been the handiwork of really evil pixies because now I clearly saw "banana peppers" where I had seen "cubanelles" before.I don't mind banana peppers on sandwiches, hoagies, and the like, but as a main course, even with sweet Italian sausage, I wouldn't recommend them. At least if you plan to retain use of your esophagus at some future date.
I threw the mess in the garbage can, and, after that, went back to a mild-and-milquetoasty diet of Liberté plum and fig yogurt, a glass of milk, and a few lemon cookies. And then for some rest in bed.
Except that with a gut full of highly flammable pepper, it's a bit of a challenge to enjoy one's slumber. After breakdancing over my tastebuds, freaking my sinuses, and jerking my tearducts, the peppers kept on partying, come-on-baby-doing-that-conga through my esophagus, mazurka'ing around my stomach, and finally, enjoying a sort of peppers-gone-wild slamdance through my intestinal tract. By the time morning had broken, well, let's just say that the party was over.
I had gone from Godzilla to Gamera, the giant flying turtle from 1950s Japanese sci-fi films.
I'll let the picture above express the thousand words, mostly expletives, that normally would follow.
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