You Know You're Advancing When You Fry Something With A Spanish Name

For months, Marina has been touting pimientos de Padrón, or Padron peppers. We finally procured some last week, but before we could eat them, Marina had the burden of going to Hawaii for vacation, poor thing. So she asked me to make sure to cook and enjoy the peppers enough for the both of us.

If that was not enough pressure, there was just a little bit more in this case, because of something I overheard when we were getting the peppers. For reasons that will become obvious, I won't mention where or how we got them; suffice to say, I was waiting for Marina next to the woman who was distributing the small bags of peppers to customers. A friend of hers pedaled up on a bike, and she greeted him cheerfully enough, and then started to speak in a quieter voice, and told him that her breast cancer was back, and that she was trying to tell everyone she knew in person.

This put me in an awkward position; I tried to disappear, as it were, steadfastly looking in another direction, not because I wasn't saddened for her, but because why would she want a complete stranger to react to such intensely personal news? How should one react in these cases? Discretion is the best response, but it was a little more ambiguous once Marina showed up and I realized that we were going to purchase peppers from the woman. Did she know that I knew what she had just told her friend?

I acted as though I had heard nothing, and simply smiled and thanked her as Marina completed the transaction, assuming she would want nothing more from a stranger than to be treated in completely normal fashion.

This meant that I would be cooking peppers provided by someone who clearly cares a lot about them, is dealing with breast cancer, and who advised us to serve the peppers by frying them in a little oil, adding a dash of salt, and matching them with a good white wine. So as I said, just a bit of pressure.

I decided to pair the peppers with scrambled eggs, just to have something else to eat in case the peppers proved intensely hot, and also because I didn't know how filling they might be. Looking online, I saw that the unique trait of these peppers is that only 1 in 10 is considered particularly hot, which seems interestingly random. I thought about putting them in the eggs, but I opted to have them on the side.

My first effort last night was not entirely satisfactory, so I am going to try again today to see if I get a better result.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 21ST

I crossed the hill to the Good Life Grocery and bought a bottle of Spanish white wine and organic brown eggs from Petaluma--outside of the industrial-agriculture complex and therefore not touched by the recall of eggs.



When I got home, I put a cast-iron frying pan on the stove, started heating the oil, dumped in the peppers, and turned on Mexican Football, Tigres versus Santos, because I figured that maybe listening to the Spanish of the announcers on TV while drinking Spanish wine and cooking a food item with a Spanish name would make me instantly more fluent in Spanish overall.

That's when I realized I had no idea how long the peppers needed to be cooked.

I madly powered up my computer while the peppers and oil sizzled and the excited Mexican television announcers spoke at a rapid fire clip about the football, and found that it should only be fried for 1-2 minutes, or until the peppers started to blister or turn brown or black.

This sounded counter-intuitive to me. All my life, the media has portrayed a blister as a bad thing. Media conspiracy, perhaps? I could understand if they said the ideal pepper should develop a callus, as if it had spent a lifetime of hard work on the vine--peppers grow on vines, right? But, as Socrates is reputed to have said, I only know that I know nothing. And yes, a little known fact is that Socrates was saying this with respect to learning how to cook peppers and pair them with kalamata olives, because even philosophers need to cook. A philosopher who can't cook can't throw dinner parties, and a philosopher without a dinner party is like a panhandler without a bus stop. (Okay, so a Google search for what Socrates/Plato actually said or might have meant complicates things beyond the scope of a blog about food; let's just move on.) If Socrates can accept that he knows nothing and can learn from other people, then so can I. I took the website's advice without a grain of salt.

Actually, that's not technically true. I added a few grains of sea salt to the oil and peppers as I fried them. As they burbled away, blisters formed and they turned brown and black, maybe a little more so than they should have done. I removed them from the heat and put them on a plate, where I dried them with a paper towel. As they dried, they lost a little of the swelling that happened during the frying process. I added a little more salt, and as I started on the eggs, I tried some of the peppers. They seemed to have a little more spice than a normal pepper, but otherwise, they were a little sweet, but nothing extraordinary. Next time, I should use less oil, I think, or dry them more, or cook them less. Or add more salt. The third pepper I tried had a little lingering heat, but nothing I couldn't handle with a sip of wine.

I decided to cook the eggs in the same pan as I used to cook the peppers, to experiment with what flavors might infuse the eggs.



Cooking the eggs in a deep pan rather than the shallow pan I normally use didn't seem to make a whole lot of difference, although the eggs bubbled a little more than I expected, which is probably due to too much heat, or maybe the remnants of the olive oil. I added salt and pepper, some basil and oregano, and then served up.



It was okay, but not as great as I would have liked. The eggs were a little oily, not as dry and crisp and fluffy as I would like, and the peppers were damp as well, and could have used more salt. However, the sixth pepper I ate after serving up was hot, leaving two delicate, parallel lashes of heat that ran the length of my tongue. Nothing unmanageable, but definitely memorable. The wine was cool and pleasant.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 22ND

Today I decided to fry some more of the peppers with a little less oil and a little more care, and accompany them with a couple quesadillas and more wine.

As I fried the peppers, I could hear them popping, absorbing the oil and heat, and I could see the blisters materializing along the green flanks. This time, the peppery scent was unmistakable.



After a couple of minutes, I scraped them onto a plate, and even as they were hitting the porcelain of the plate, they were deflating, shrinking with a quiet hiss; it felt like time-lapse photography. I put them in a small bowl, added more salt, and this time, they are more flavorful, a little hotter, though so far, nothing like the surge of heat from the one pepper from last night. The trick may have been less oil, less cooking time, more drying, and more salt.

They tasted sweet and hot, an excellent counterpoint to the texture of the cheese quesadillas. I feel much better about this effort today. Has anyone else done anything special with this type of pepper? What sort of recipes do you have?