Chilies and other real food.

I followed a link from Instapundit to the website of Nina Planck, author of Real Food, which I have on order from Amazon.  She has these suggestions for chili peppers that intrigued me.

How do I love to eat chiles? Let me count the ways. For a snack, I go to the garden and pick a Garden Salsa, a blue-red pepper like a mild cayenne, and bite off the tip right before the hot pith starts. It's delicious to eat with a crisp apple. In the kitchen, there are dozens of jars of ground chiles and hot sauces, strings of whole peppers and baskets of fresh ones. In the fridge, there's a jar of apple cider vinegar with cut-up hot peppers for collard greens, soups or fish. Olive oil spiked with fresh chile sits on the counter. I love a side dish of anchos saut饤 in butter and olive oil-more butter and olive oil than they need. (Chicken fat is also good.) I pour the warm hot-pepper fat on rice, arugula? anything.

Peppers are not out of place in breakfast, either. With my morning egg, I have a side dish of hot peppers fried in butter, and I like a fresh chile, split-open, in peppermint tea. Roasted jalape񯠢utter is terrific on hot sweet corn, which I mention here only because I grew up eating corn for breakfast.

Why limit hot peppers to savory foods? I ate summer's last white peaches sprinkled with a scorching but sublimely fruity sauce made of savina peppers and sweet potato. I once made a wonderful mango and habanero frozen yogurt. If you can taste anything beyond the intense heat, the boxy habanero and its West Indian cousin, Scotch Bonnet, have the flavor of tropical fruit.

Yum.

Comments

[Angela C.]

Well, you can also put green chile on grilled cheese sandwiches, mix it in with your scrambled eggs, put it in a baked potato with some cheese, or add some to a can of pork and beans to make it more interesting. You can even bake it into homemade bread and tortillas. However, even though I am a native New Mexican, I couldn't begin to tell you the different names for the chile. All I know is that it's green or red -- mild, medium, or hot. And if you want to stay safe, just stick to Old El Paso canned green chile. Oh my, come to think of it it's harvest time for chile here and the smells of roasted chile waft quite fragrantly around Albuquerque. :) You'll have to come down next year if you can in September!