Grilled vegetables & killer stealth chilli peppers

Making a salad for supper last night, I reached over to a platter of vegetables on the counter & selected a long lime green hot pepper.

Before chopping it up, I cut off a sliver from the end, popped it in my mouth & chewed.

Oh sweet mother of God I thought I was going to die. I swear steam came out my ears like a dragon smoking crack.

I have a super high tolerance for chili: hot sauce is just another ketchup to me, but this was something quite, quite different. Swigging wine from the bottle to try to assuage the fire (capsaicin doesn't dissolve in water, only alcohol or oil), I reflected that when we grilled the peppers for Sunday lunch they were just mildly hot not suicidally gullet scorchingly dangerous. I hadn't realised that cooking them would assuage the intrinsic heat of the pepper. Lesson learned.

This is the plate of vegetables I bought at the Red Bank farmers market. Note the stealth killer peppers at centre stage. I've never seen purple bell peppers before, nor the teeny tiny glossy finger aubergines (eggplants) so, of course, I had to buy them.



Grilled, the aubergines were a great success. I split them down the middle, cross scoring the flesh, then marinating them with the rest of the vegetables in olive oil, bashed up garlic & thyme leaves (fresh, not the sawdust dried kind). The purple peppers were less successful, fading to an unappealing greige colour on the grill. (Bottom left of platter pic below).

They were tasteless raw and pretty much stayed the same way cooked. Better off looking decorative on GG's Jordanian platter I think.