So...Carl and I had a pretty thrilling evening last night, and yes--there was a blindfold involved. Bell peppers as well.

It was my idea this time. Inspired by a recent episode of "Top Chef" in which the contestants had to put together seven courses of food, getting progressively hotter on the Scoville scale (the measure of hotness of spicy peppers, with jalapenos scoring around 5,000 and Carolina Reapers around 2,000,000), I put together a little tasting test for Carl and me. I used peppers, but not spicy ones. 

Curious about the taste differences among different colors of bell peppers, I bought one each of the four most common colors: green, yellow, orange, and red. Without tasting them ahead of time, both of us (blindfolded) tasted all four and then tried to identify the tasting order. 

Our senses of sight cut off, we definitely focused more on the smell, taste, and crunch of each pepper. I was actually amazed how different they are, some keeping their flavor more buttoned up and others being very generous with sweetness and even perceived salt. I'd recently charred red peppers for use in a dinner recipe and had been impressed by how fun that process was and how versatile the skinned roasted peppers are. Without any "control," however, our perceptions of the four colors/flavors were subjective, each pepper judged on its probable position within the rainbow-colored lineup. Would I be able to taste red?

We ran through the lineup twice and got slightly different results each time. The most intense moment for me was when, the second time through, the use of the blindfold actually started to mess with my sensory organization. Because my eyes were open but I couldn't see, I felt sort of "off." After tasting the four colors blindly and making my guesses, I panicked a little and told Carl to wait. I relaxed into the impressions that had just been made and all of the sudden I could literally SEE that the order I'd told him was wrong. With more clarity, I could see they'd stacked up as:

GREEN: closed off, vegetal
YELLOW: slightly more juicy, slightly sweet
ORANGE: slightly salty; juicy and full of flavor
RED: the sweetest one

I told him my new guesses (the pepper order was random), and all four were correct. 

Synesthesia is when impressions between two or more different senses interact with each other, like being able to hear music or see flavors. While I don't consider myself a full synesthete, I've been interested in the idea for a long time, because when I was a child I really did have mixed sense impressions, knowing (for instance) that every letter of the alphabet had a definite color. While this has faded somewhat over the years, last night with peppers on the tongue and a blindfold on the eyes, I had a clear sense of how amazing sense perceptions can really be.​

I did a bit of research later and found out that all bell peppers begin as green peppers, then turn colors as they ripen, depending on the variety of pepper. So the green pepper I'd selected could have eventually turned into one of the other colors--though we'll never know which! This spring I'd like to look for purple bell peppers. Can you imagine--a peck of purple pickled peppers?

Cheers to the many senses and colors of good taste!

Things got a little crazy around here this past week and night. One of our employees, Amy, had suggested to Carl the 1996 movie "The Big Night," a movie about Italian immigrant brothers in the U.S., trying to keep their traditional restaurant from having to close. We watched it last week and enjoyed it--good acting and good food. (And, of course, Isabella Rossellini.)

The central recipe in the movie's big restaurant dinner party scene is called timpano (also related to a timballo), a massive Italian pasta-and-everything-else dish which is baked inside a crust inside a Dutch oven. It is a truly ridiculous many-layer multi-day endeavor. Perfect for me!

I found a user-friendly vegetarian recipe version online and spent two days doing the various tasking, which included boiling the eggs, making the tomato sauce and ricotta, charring the red peppers, rolling out a crust as big as our table--quite the event! My dad helped me assemble it in the Dutch oven, and then we all waited two more hours to see if the thing would behave and release when the oven (all 23 pounds of it!) was inverted. I certainly was holding my breath.

Amazingly, it actually turned out pretty well. It's just that at some point, either while slicing it into massive wedges or looking at everything that came with it onto your plate, you can't help but shake your head. I used to think LASAGNA was the most labor-intensive dish--when my mom made it, it was a true labor of love. Our timpano wasn't exactly elegant, but we could certainly taste the good intentions and all of the mounds and mounds of tasty ingredients. 

Like consuming an apartment building full of food. 

What ultimately matters, of course, just as in the movie, is that the effort put into food to share with those we love is effort well spent, well spent indeed. We had a gloriously warm and silly evening., well stuffed.

Salute!!