This summer I undertook a potted garden on my apartment porch (8'x8'). It is a two tier affair with long planters hanging from the railing and pots placed below the planters on the deck. in one of my biggest deck pots I planted one cayenne pepper plant (Cayenne Long Slim) and one orange habanero plant. Now I love hot food (hence the plants) and have been very excited by the bountiful number of peppers my plants are producing. This past week the first peppers have started to ripen and I harvested a cayenne pepper for a pasta sauce I was making from the tomatoes I have grown on my deck (I've harvested 28 lbs of tomatoes from my deck so far). Now being the foolishly curious type, I sampled a small sliver of my cayenne pepper by itself (with a glass of milk on standby). Oh my god was it hot. The oils even burned my fingers. Making matters worse, the oils from the pepper embedded in my fingers and I couldn't touch my face for days without burning my eyes. The pepper help make for an awesome sauce (tomatoes, cayenne and yellow bell peppers from my garden; mushrooms, smoked bacon, Italian seasonings, salt and black pepper from the store).
So, I've learned my lesson, maybe, and probably won't be eating my hot peppers very often by themselves. However, I'm not above giving taste samples to daring friends, which I did the other evening.
This one friend took a slice of my cayenne pepper (seeded), and chewed it diligently with no change in expression. He used no milk or any other chaser to cool the tongue. His comment was that it was really good and about as hot as the habanero peppers he is used to. Talk about an iron tongue! Well, I was dully impressed and before he headed back to his home in NJ I gave him three freshly harvested cayenne peppers and the very first habanero pepper to ripen from my plant. The only time I've seen someone more egger for a favorite food item is when you give an exotic dark chocolate to a chocoholic.
Now I have to wait for another habanero pepper to ripen so that I can find out just how hot they are. Although I expect I will only taste a small sliver with a glass of milk standing by. My ultimate plan is to dry my peppers for use in sauces and to feed fresh ones to some of my more boastful friends to see just how well they can handle the peppers.
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