Tonight I made whole wheat pasta with Barbara Kafka’s Fried Peppers and Tomatoes, along with some focaccia. It was good that I made the bread, because the sauce was so hot (jalapeno hot, not Fahrenheit hot) that my son and my nephew were barely able to eat it. It was good, but it was really spicy. Maybe I used the wrong kind of peppers – the recipe says “hot green peppers (about 4-5 inches long)” which sounds like jalapenos to me, so that’s what I used. Also, Ms. Kafka does use the adjective “sinus-clearing.” Anyway, with apologies to Carly Simon (in the unlikely event that she is reading my blog) I later found myself singing “I had some dreams, they were flames in my pasta, flames in my pasta, ’cause/You’re so vain….”
Try the recipe, but I’m telling you right now that if you are cooking for children, the ulcer-prone, or other innocents, you should seriously consider reducing the quantity of hot peppers and increasing the number of frying peppers and/or tomatoes. I would also probably cut up the hot peppers, at least a little bit, the next time; the recipe calls for no reduction in size other than stemming them, and it took a long time for them to cook compared to the quartered frying peppers.
