[Sca-cooks] capsicums

[Saint Phlip]

Well, you guys see the difficulty as being too much capsicum pepper on
things, I see it rather differently, being a lover of the peppers
myself.

The problem is not the usage of the peppers, per se, but the
indiscriminate usage by people who don't understand the usage of hot
peppers, and how their specific flavors can enhance foods.

Now, Margali and I are Mutt-n-Jeff, as far as spicing foods goes. For
any given recipe, she'll halve the amount of spices and I'll double
them ;-) And, she strongly dislikes capsicum peppers, although she
occasionally enjoys wasabi or horseradish.

However, where she just sees heat in the spices I love, I find heat
and flavor. Occasionally, she'll try to spice something up to my
liking, but all she manages to do is add heat- and that's not what I'm
looking for. I have a fairly wide selection of hot spices, and I mix
and balance rthem to what I like- if you can't taste past the heat,
you just aren't going to find that balance.

And, this is where you guys who don't like hot peppers are suffering.
The people who are spicing these foods are looking at Paul Prudhomme,
or Emeril, and saying, 'Oh, all he's doing is adding hot peppers and
everyone is paying big bucks for his food" and adding hot peppers with
somewhat less successful results, and that's NOT all either of them
are doing- there's an underlayment to the food that they're totally
missing. It's sort of like Medieval food and brown goo- yes, some
Medieval foods can come out looking like brown goo- but just because
it's brown goo doesn't mean it's Medieval food.

If it makes any of you guys feel better, the indiscriminate use of hot
peppers annoys me too- and I like them. The only reason I don't
complain is because it's making more varieties of hot peppers
accessible to me, along with some very nice condiments. Mrs Dash's
Southwest Chipotle seasoning is a very nice blend, for example, much
better than their Extra Spicy although so help me I can't taste the
advertised chipotles- OTOH, I can now GET chipotles- used to be very
hard to come by.

-- 
Saint Phlip

Heat it up
Hit it hard
Repent as necessary.

Priorities:

It's the smith who makes the tools, not the tools which make the smith.