chili pepperzz in the land of superlatives

9 November, 2007 | 7 comments | Category: ethnicity

I knew it! I knew it! I knew it!

the red hot sizzle of chili is soo good for u, it is medicative!!! no wonder my auntie used to tell me to eat chili when i got a cold.

Not only am i’m an addict of hot sizzle chili, i’m also a lover of all foods *spicy*…so when BBC bust it out that scientists “can harness the heat in chili peppers and adapt it to combat inflammation in arthritis.”

i was all like ‘woaaaaahhh hot tamale’! or rather ‘abet Qaria’!

i’m the little girl who used to concoct pastes of berbere & butter, berbere & water to be eaten with injera for breakfast, lunch or afternoon snack. i would spread dollops of it on injera being heated on a mitad clay plate which seeps the moisure from spongy pores transforming injera to crunch-ilicious Qategna… *|mouth watering|*… i was one to mix lemon squeeze with berebere that goes on top of rice with salsa, i would chop up green chili to make some ‘pasta saltata’, add more hot hot mitmita to kitfo …i’m still that little girl…

…with one difference! Now, when someone obliquely & proudly (!??) proclaims the unmatched heat & spiciness of Ethiopian cuisines, my eyebrow pricks up into an arc…

i’ve come across chili in varieties… Ghanaian Sheto sauce with fish, shrimp in the marinade is extremely potent, while the Thai method of splashing pickled, ground or oiled chili mixed with seeds is nothing short of flaming tearjerker if overdone ever so slightly! other… indians, turks, mexicans… use chili across their cuisines in various forms…while some, exhibit exceptional cultural idiosyncrasies like some crazy naija people who carry emergency packets of ‘peppe’ everywhere! or the Filipinos & Koreans eating chilli leaves? *|yet another priceless eyebrow raising moment!|*

stereotypically… ethiopians believe their tongues withhold the very feistiest of many a pepper & their cuisine uses it! …which should not be much of a surprise given they readily embrace many a superlative about ethiopia/ians… ethiopians the most beautiful people of the world, with the most fertile and green landscapes on earth, the fiercest warriors that defied all colonial rule, the fastest of people, living in the ‘origin of civilization and humankind’, the home of selected people by God to protect the arc of the covenant… yadi ya…content ubernationalism makes gorgeous-est and spice-desensitized-tongued Ethiopians ssssssssssssssmooookiiiinnnn’ …

….chili pepperzz FYI

“The Naga Jolokia (Bhut Jolokia, Ghost Chili, Ghost Pepper, Naga Morich) is a chili pepper that grows in northeastern India (Assam, Nagaland, and Manipur) and Bangladesh. It was confirmed by Guinness World Records to be the hottest chili in the world…”

chili peppers are implicated with many health benefits! …and disbenefits… *|blink|*

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7 comments to “chili pepperzz in the land of superlatives”

Xunarax, November 10th, 2007 at 12:28 pm:

• Woy gud…

  How different life is for different people… .. yehiwot CHinqet – Qen mata inQilf yemiasaTa lehonebin… to click around aimlessly to land smack in the den of a habesha in ferenj-land who is this excited about pepper… enough to write about it so umm… ebulliently… Woy gud

  te’amir newe… but then sort of understandable. How boring it’d all be if we and the things we face weren’t all so different….

  Tiru tiTSfialesh, ihit… Berchy.

tpeace, November 10th, 2007 at 2:29 pm:

• thank your for your visit, wendim. indeed, it is refreshing to read your comment. I encourage you to read more of the entries in this blog and share what you think. I am intrigued by the type of life experiences you imagine inspired this entry.

Xunarax, November 10th, 2007 at 4:39 pm:

• ahh… I love your last sentence.

  Casually put but it seems to hide a lot of annoyance dipped in bemusement… May I imagine hearing an angry voice… color: purple… going “This A.hole thinks he knows what I been through…uh uh… who the phuque does he think he izz?!”… but somehow I suspect you don’t speak that way… hehe… The life experiences I imagined? Well, be intrigued no more… There were none.

  Gin for some reason, I feel the urge to do a confessional/meQebaTer here… I am killing time – and it’s killing me – and I haven’t had many people to umm.. talk to these days…..

  Relax, ihit… I am no troll and after many years of bitter lessons, I have approached a point where I have resigned to never being able to understand humans… and after many attempts I am getting close to permanently pausing my natural (?) tendencies of evaluation/judgement/competition of/with people around me. I’ve finally realized that there is overwhelmingly little that I know… that I can know……that it now pains me whenever my impulse kicks in and I feel like intellectualizing and pontificating on issues…

  Ij seTichalehu. astonished.

  There was a time when I used to like scribbling my thoughts…passionate – I still love that word -thoughts… I remember witnessing threads..wisps of thought transforming before my mind’s eye into umm…effervescent bubbles which gushed out of my head as I put them down on paper… As obscene as I may risk sounding especially talking to a lady… the feeling was not unlike ejaculating… ahhh… there! thoughts immortalized… But… that was then.
  Futile hopes & efforts for stumbling on… lol..truth or on vanity’s lure of etching my mark for eternity…
  The insanity of pride… a life of fear…the lonely, lonely walks of anxiety…What the phuque! As my brothers would say, someone/somethin had to tell me what’s what. It all falls down….
  Tift.
  Dirgim

  zim.
  CHiCH.

  How life is filled with these potholes…which break into tunnels of absolute darkness impervious to any light…How death can seem a sweet sweet retreat… one can almost imagine the beautiful posters that can be made for the after-death… if they had any good tourism bureau there… but then, I guess they don’t need one,…..

  FeTary Amlak hoy.
  Ante aleh.
  Ant tifeTSimaleh.
  Ante NEH.

  ijain yazewe ibakih.

  Asayegne.

  I can’t even begin to think about imagining your life experiences, ihit. And that’s about as true a statement as I can ever express…

  By the way Wodayt akababy newe yaleshiw Amerika wisT? ….Wode hager bet temelash nesh woys in for the long haul?

tpeace, November 12th, 2007 at 6:00 pm:

• wendim, i’m blown away by your articulation… i would love to catch a glimpse of any of your written pieces, should allow it…

  And shall i say… I empathize…

  “it now pains me whenever my impulse kicks in and I feel like intellectualizing and pontificating on issues…” – |*sigh*|
  that’s simply disheartening! can i ask you if you ask yourself “why not??”
  there’s a saying that’s been stuck in my head since i heard it…. “I regret not the things I’ve done, but those I did not do.”
  I do not claim to have any answers to your probing thoughts but it seems such a pity that given the talent and..uh…passion I sense from ur comment, that you would feel apathy toward formulating those threads into captivating bubbles…
  i for one can’t wait to look back at what i once wrote and at the most amusing think: “how preposterous!”, smile and remember the fabulous time I had writing it…and what was happening in life @ that time…

Reading our Ethnic Past through Genes « |s?nduQ|, March 12th, 2008 at 9:43 am:

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senduQ » Why I write about Ethnicity…, March 14th, 2009 at 1:21 am:

• [...] chillipepperz in the land of superlatives [...]

senduQ » Opposite Sides of the Border: Eritrea, October 28th, 2009 at 3:09 am:

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