Chili peppers

Jamie Oliver, aka The Naked Chef, is, even as I type, cooking chili peppers on his show about home cooking. Right now, he's making pork and chili peppers...yum! OK--actually they are bell peppers, which are sweeter and less pointy.

Bell peppers--Image by Aldipower (used under Gnu documentation license)

It's ironic that Oliver, who is British...or at least made his debut on BBC...is using a food generally regarded for it's 'hotness' when the local cuisine, like bubble and squeak, is generally regarded as cabbage or potato-based, boiled, and rather bland. Of course, he is using words like "wodge" to describe this Hungarian-based dish, so perhaps it is rather more British than I thought.

Cubanelle peppers--large, relatively sweet chilis. Public domain photo from the US Department of Agriculture.

What on earth is a "wodge" anyway ....

{Skip to Hermione-Granger-esque scene of MightyIsis surrounded by cookbooks and the OED}

..."chunk, lump, or amount"? Hmmph.

(Right) Spot the "wodge"-- no, not the tater tots (yum). Public domain photo from the US Department of Agriculture.

In any event, a wodge of chili peppers, particularly a big one, most often evokes Mexican, Southwestern, or other spicy cooking. Just think about the Morimoto-Love Iron Chef battle--chili-o-rama, and Love, a Texan chef, won. Not that Asian cuisine doesn't use a lot of chilis...maybe my North American biases are coming out here.

And I love curry. It's really yummy, and there's this great Indian restaurant nearby, in a train. A pink train, with green trim (no, it's not really preppy at all...) . But they do have great food, and a full bar, and a pool table (no, really, a pool table).

(left) John Bull--an early locomotive. Public domain photo (copyright is expired). This train is not pink.

Anyway...

Chili peppers also have another function--the hotness evaluation in Rate My Professor. MightyIsis is "hot" on the chili pepper scale (why, I don't know), as indicated by a red chili pepper.

But isn't it ironic that students use the red chili pepper for this function when they don't probably listen to the Red Hot Chili Peppers?

I think so. ...no, they're not a vegetable, they're a band.