The Final Post: Chili Peppers

I decided for my last post to share a random fact I learned yesterday about chili peppers.

Apparently, historically, peppers got noticeably hotter the further south you went (to a point); the hottest peppers flourished in Brazil, the Yucatan, and India. Biologists now believe that this was actually a defense mechanism developed by chilis in tropical climates to ward off predators, particularly aphids and cicadas (which are disgusting anyway).

Apparently, said predators have a nasty habit of munching on the peppers, and then flying off; the puncture marks they leave behind allow moulds to enter into the pepper and basically rot it from within.

As it turns out, capsaicin, the organic compound responsible for chili peppers' heat, is an antimicrobial agent that prevents the moulds from doing long-term damage to the pepper. It has the added benefit of warding off cicadas and other predatory insects, which are sensitive to capsaicin and can't stand the heat.

As you go further north, the older, indigenous species of peppers become milder, apparently due to the lack of a good reason to pump up the heat. 

Huh.

Well that's the end of that.

Take care, folks!

Death Valley

My Dad ended up coming out this week.

Background: my Dad still lives on the East Coast, where I grew up, and we hadn't seen each other in four years. Between the pandemic, and me moving back and forth across oceans, it just did not work out, on more than one occasion. Since things have settled, at least a little bit, this seemed like the best time.

We ended up going to Death Valley. We got to see the salt flats, and every other kind of desert scenery you can imagine.

On the way back, we stopped in Pahrump, where a friend of mine just moved out to.

To the surprise of everyone, it turns out that a group of folks from India bought one of the hotels in town, and decided to buy a bar down the road from it and turn it into an Indian restaurant. The end result is a sports bar that also serves amazing North Indian food.

Never in my life would I have thought that I would have great Indian food in Pahrump, but I did.

Good trip over all.

Coconut Water Is Nice

I like all things coconut.

I like coconut cream pie. I like curries made from coconut milk. I like Tom Kha Gai (I ate a local version of it almost every day when I was in Thailand), and all other Thai dishes involving coconut. I liked the myriad of coconut-infused desserts that my office ate all the time when I worked in Honolulu.

Lately, as it's been getting hotter out, I've started occasionally sucking down coconut water again.

Regular water is fine. I've got a pitcher that alkalizes it for me, and it tastes good; it tastes better with lemon. Sometimes, though, I just don't want to drink plain water anymore; after four or five glasses of it, I really just want something else. That's when I bust out the coconut water.

It's a refreshing alternative to a necessary, but sometimes boring beverage.