Cold and Hot?

North of us got their first freeze and we are 34F this morning with no frost on the grass. Everything still looks the same outside the windows. But I slept in. I am alone ( I keep reminding you) and I woke up around 6:00 A.M. and read a little in bed. Then I turned off the lights and snuggled back down into the soft flannel sheets and under the light downy quilt and drifted back into blissful sleep for several hours as dawn slid into place. It was the cold outside that makes me lazy and slothful inside. I love pulling up those blankets and not having an agenda set by an alarm. I have worked hard (not as hard as many) for this time in my life and I am thankful for this morning.  I eventually made a pot of decaffinated coffee but returned to reading "The Forest Lover" by Susan Vreeland.  (It is the life story of the Canadian artist Emily Carr based on her journals.  She lived 1871-1945 and lived in the Northwest with the indigenous people much of that time and with great discrimination by her culture.)  The writer brings me to cold and rainy British Columbia as I remain so warm as I snuggle back into bed with a warm cup.

Now for the hot:

For those of you who know about Scolville scales with hot peppers, you may remember the big deal when Habaneras became a fad for cooking.  They were not a condiment for the faint of heart and kept their level at the height of heat in pepper cooking.  They were rated as 250,000 to 577,000 on the scale.  Well, hubby got seeds from our daughter for the newest pepper, the Carolina Reaper, which he planted this summer.  This pepper is rated as 1.6 million(!) and has held the world record since 2013.

We (daughter, hubby and I) chopped some of them for testing.  (When green they have no heat at all!)  

I took one of those tiny red pieces and put it on the end of my tongue and I died.  I spit it out, but the heat kept on.  My daughter also choked on the heat.  My grandson (pretended) it was not bad at all.  My daughter put it in some vinegar for taking home and adding to whatever.

While they are extremely beautiful, this is killer stuff.

I have no big fondness for super hot food, although I do like my chile with a tiny bit of bite.  Researching I found there is a new pepper accidentally raised in Wales that will challenge the Carolina Reaper.  It is called Dragon's Breath and is 2.48 million on the Scoville scale.

I have read that eating lots of hot food does kill the taste buds over time and may be the reason that people who regularly eat hot food (Indonesians) find most food in the U.S. too bland.

I will also leave you with this caution:

"Concentrated capsaicin, found in the Dragon's Breath and other extremely spicy peppers, can trigger the immune system to go into overdrive. Capsaicin activates the proteins found on nerve endings, and those proteins can mistakenly interpret capsaicin as a signal of extreme heat entering the body, Live Science reported. The result? Reactions like anaphylactic shock, severe burns, and even the closing of one's airways are all possible, experts warn. So this extreme pepper is nothing to mess around with."