OK, time for another cooking show here on the Dog Channel. Remember the NPR kung pao chicken recipe I linked to a while back? Well, I’ve reprised it a few times since, ramping up the chile content each time and changing the protein from chicken to beef to pork.
Today Herself and I are both suffering from various ailments — allergies, injuries, you name it — and so I went for the healing pork and 14 chiles plus an overflowing teaspoon of Sichuan peppercorns. Hijo, madre, puto, cabron … my head is still sweating. And I think I just grew a third testicle. It was that powerful.
But there’s not a picture, because we were both so beat down and hungry that we just dove right in, and I ate all the leftovers for seconds. Sorry ’bout that. Stir fry up a batch yourself and you’ll forgive me for my piggishness.
Mad Blog Media 
As a haole druid gringo with basically translucent skin-tone and a stomach designed to handle not much more than a boiled potato, I have a tentative relationship with the chile. Love ’em, and can’t say I ever had much of a post-meal reaction to them, but while in transit from fork to gut, I’ll sweat like a hooker in church, or worse, like a Promise Keeper in the boys’ locker room.
So, dumb-ass that I am, I bought half a bushel of assorted peppers at the farmer’s market last week, and failed to segregate the hot from the mild. I bought the hot thinking I’d slowly work them into some salsas, and use the mild for things like this gougère I’ve been meaning to try for a while. But now they’re in one big pile, and the only way to guess which is which is to take a bite out of them … something that might leave my mouth looking like Fourmile Canyon.