Why can't I find where to get a xaxxogram on your website?

Sometimes I think my place of employment is more concerned with limiting healthcare than providing it. Today I was asked not to link to some services that are for preventative care in the most commonsense spot since the office is overbooked, understaffed and can't manage the demand. The website is for providing information not to limiting its access.

What happened to the orange pepper.

I made spicy chicken drumsticks with a recipe I found on the Simply Recipes blog. It was similar to another recipe that I once made from the 1997 edition of the Joy of Cooking. That recipe required an obscene amount of garlic and jalapeno peppers ground together, stuffed under the skin of chicken drumsticks and thighs, marinated for hours, and slow cooked for two hours in the oven. The slow roasting peppers made my eyes water and the windows had to be opened and I declared my recipe a disaster. However, once the chicken was finished cooking, I peeled back the skin and scrapped off the garlic pepper paste and the most tender and surprisingly flavorful chicken was revealed. It was still quite spicy but the chicken tasted far better than it had smelled when it was cooking.

So the spicy chicken drumsticks recipe was not quite as good... but it was a fine experiment.

Since then I have received a new, tiny, bright red pepper from the same friend. We will have to see what will come of that.

You might be wondering...

...about what happened to that pepper. I'll follow up on that later.

In the meantime, you might want to wonder what these doctors were expecting to find when they conducted a systematic review of randomized controlled trials on the efficacy of parachutes preventing death and trauma. Their tongue-in-cheek paper is an entertaining read.

Could you imagine choosing who would get the placebo parachute during a controlled trial?

How a suggestion turned into the real deal

My friends gave me an orange (supposedly hot) pepper as I left their party last night and suggested I blog about what happens to it. They feared the heat of the pepper and gave it to me after hearing me profess my love of hot peppers. Or at least that's how I think it came about... I was tipsy at the time and all I remembered was:
Take this pepper. Pepper hot. Blog about it.

I am not necessarily a connoisseur of hot peppers. My love of peppers is currently limited to:

• hot giardinera (the stuff that goes on a Chicago Italian Beef)
  
• pepperoncini (not really hot but super vinegary)
  
• jalapenos
  
• pickled jalapenos and carrots
  
• sport peppers (hot and vinegary)
  

I'm not sure if this pepper is a habanero or a jalapeno.

The handy visual guide to peppers has brought me to those two possible options.

In the meantime while I pondered the true identity of my pepper I baked pineapple right-side-up cupcakes from the recipe in Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World! They look like they turned out well. Haven't had a taste test of the finished product yet... though all the components definitely tasted wonderful (for instance the topping alone would make an excellent pineapple sundae topping) which leads me to think that they are probably fine.