By Patricia Aaron
For the Journal
NEW MEXICO’S OWN: From mid-September until frost, green chile matures and turns deep red. Green chiles that turn red in the fields signal the coming of autumn in New Mexico, just like the yellow cottonwood leaves and blooming chamisa.
New Mexicans have traditionally harvested and strung red chiles into colorful strings called ristras, Spanish for “strings.” Ristras are an ingenious way to prevent mice and birds from damaging the pods as they dry in New Mexico’s sun for use during the winter. When it’s time to make chile sauce, cooks cut the pods from the ristras.
DESCRIPTION: Nearly all peppers start out green. If left to ripen before picking, they turn red, yellow, purple or whatever, depending on the variety. Green chile maturing into red chile is like an immature green apple ripening into a red one. The more mature the pepper, the hotter it is.
Chile peppers come in a staggering variety— Cayenne, Serrano, Tabasco and Paprika as well as Big Jim, Sandia, Barker and New Mex 6-4 or Hatch. All can be dried for later use.
NUTRITION: Generally speaking, the more vivid the color, the more nutrients the pepper contains. Red and yellow peppers are the real nutritional bargains. They have twice as much vitamin C as green ones— about 170 milligrams in 3 ounces. A red pepper has 9 times as much beta carotene (a precursor of vitamin A) as a green one. Peppers also contain potassium, plus a little folic acid, calcium, some fiber, carotenoids and beneficial phytochemicals.
TO BUY: Purchase a chile ristra with mature red chile pods. Hang the ristra in full sun where there is good ventilation. The chile can turn moldy and rot without proper air circulation. Mold causes discoloration which detracts from the ristra’s natural beauty and would preclude using the chile as food.
Chile pods from ristras sprayed with plastic, shellac or insecticide are not edible and are to be used for decoration.
TO USE: To make red chile purée, select 12 large red chile pods. Remove stems, seeds and yellow veins. Wash pods in warm water, lifting pods out of water and changing water several times.
In a large pan, cover washed chile pods with warm water. Let stand 1 hour for pods to rehydrate. Add warm water as needed.
Simmer pods and water 10 minutes. The pulp should be soft, thick and separate from the skin. In a blender, process pods and some of the water to a smooth purée. Press through a sieve to remove peel.
TO SERVE: Spoon Red Chile Sauce over meats, tacos, chile rellenos, eggs or beans. Serve as a dip with chips or fresh vegetables. Use as a sauce in enchiladas and other casserole dishes. Flavor soups and stews.
If you’d like directions for making a chile ristra, call 243-1386 in Albuquerque and request brochure “Using Chile … Making Ristras.”

RED CHILE SAUCE
1 cup red chile purée
1 cup water
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
In a medium-size pan, combine chile purée, water, garlic, salt and vegetable oil. Simmer 10 minutes, stirring frequently. Stir in oregano and simmer 5 minutes. Makes 2 cups.

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Patricia Aaron is the extension home economist with the Bernalillo County Extension Service and New Mexico State University

Although I’m not a big fan of football, there’s something about the excitement of the season combined with the chill of fresh autumn air that revs up the appetite for spicy, filling foods.

When I tag along to see a game at someone’s house, I don’t concern myself with what the defensive line is up to, but with what’s on the menu — spicy chicken wings with lots of dipping sauce. They’re easy to eat with one hand, an important consideration when you’re perched on a sofa, balancing a paper plate loaded with food.

I recognized the value of dipping sauce while in Shanghai. I was in a Western-style restaurant where Buffalo wings with blue cheese dressing was on the menu. But when the wings arrived at our table, there was no dressing to be found. When I went to the restaurant another time, I brought my own bottle of dressing.

It was also in China that I tasted a subtly sweet hoisin-based sauce that had the makings of a great dip for spicy chicken wings.

At home, I tinkered with ingredients I had seen in a sparerib marinade, adding the tartness of plum sauce, the warmth of star anise, the low-voltage heat of chili paste, and the fiery punch of fresh red chile peppers.

I envisioned a dipping sauce that was creamy and cooling to the taste buds, flavors that didn’t mask or clash with the delicately assertive Asian flavors.

The result: mahogany-colored chicken wings baked in a robust marinade that whispers of Chinatown spices. The accompanying sour cream dip is flavored with bits of salty feta cheese and pungent cilantro. It’s a diverse and delicious pairing — casual enough for football buddies and sophisticated enough for before-dinner nibbling.

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Spicy Asian Chicken Wings
If you want to use the marinade as a dipping sauce, double the recipe and reserve a third of it after bringing it to a boil and before mixing it with the raw chicken.

INGREDIENTS:
1/4 cup hoisin sauce

1/2 cup soy sauce

1/3 cup plum sauce

1/4 cup sherry

1/4 cup Asian sesame oil

2 tablespoons grated fresh ginger

1/2 cup chopped green onions

4 garlic cloves, grated

1 fresh chile pepper, chopped (with seeds)

1 tablespoon chili paste (add more if you like it hotter)

2 whole star anise

2 pounds chicken wings, trim off wing tips, and cut the wings into 2 pieces

Dipping Sauce (see recipe)

INSTRUCTIONS:
Combine the hoisin, soy and plum sauces in a saucepan. Add the sherry, sesame oil, ginger, onions, garlic, chile pepper, chili paste and star anise; stir well to blend. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, then reduce heat and simmer for 15 minutes. Remove from heat and let cool to room temperature.

Put the chicken wings in a glass or plastic container and pour the cooled sauce over them. Remove the star anise. Turn the wings in the sauce to make sure each is coated thoroughly. Cover and refrigerate preferably overnight, but at least 4 hours.

Preheat the oven to 375°. Line a baking sheet with foil; oil the foil.

Remove the chicken from the marinade (reserve the marinade) and place on the prepared baking sheet. Bake for 20 minutes, then turn the wings over and bake for an additional 15 to 20 minutes, until the wings are a rich brown and cooked through, basting with the reserved marinade every 15 minutes.

Immediately remove the wings to a serving plate (if allowed to cool on the pan, the chicken will stick to the foil).

Serve at room temperature with the dipping sauce.

Serves 4 as an appetizer

PER SERVING (without dip): 460 calories, 25 g protein, 17 g carbohydrate, 31 g fat (7 g saturated), 95 mg cholesterol, 2,115 mg sodium, 1 g fiber.

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Feta, Cilantro & Sour Cream Dipping Sauce

INGREDIENTS:
1 cup sour cream

1/4 cup mayonnaise

1/4 cup finely chopped cilantro

1 tablespoon white wine

1/2 cup crumbled feta cheese

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

INSTRUCTIONS:
Whisk together all ingredients and pour into serving bowl. Refrigerate until serving time.

Yields about 1 3/4 cups

PER TABLESPOON: 40 calories, 1 g protein, 1 g carbohydrate, 4 g fat (2 g saturated), 7 mg cholesterol, 50 mg sodium, 0 fiber.

Linda Furiya divides her time between San Francisco and Shanghai. E-mail her at food@sfchronicle.com.

Publish Date : 11/19/2004 10:53:00 AM Source : Onlypunjab.com Team

The Sinus Buster is the world’s first commercially produced hot pepper nasal spray manufactured by SiCap Industries of Altamont, New York. The Sinus Buster uses Capsicum, a natural oily resin derived from certain varieties of hot peppers. The active medicinal chemical in Capsicum is “Capsaicin,” the ingredient that puts the “hot” in hot peppers.

Although Capsaicin is its’ main active ingredient, the Sinus Buster formula incorporates an exclusive mixture of completely natural herbal extracts and other ingredients that are designed to work in combination with the pepper extract. The ingredients are as follows: Oleoresin Capsicum, Eucalyptus Oil, Rosemary Extract, Ascorbic Acid as pure Vitamin C, Sea Salt, and Aloe Vera Gel in a base of purified water.

“We adhere to strict standards so we can proudly call Sinus Buster all natural. A lot of natural health and dietary supplements out there call themselves all natural, but in truth many are not. I mean I use this stuff too…everyday of my life, and I refuse to put something up my nose that’s not all natural. I’ve been on so many medications that never worked over the years, and when I discovered the power of pepper I knew I finally had the ticket. And just think…it all came from mother nature,” says Wayne Perry, President and founder of SiCap Industries.

Perry, a long time chronic cluster headache and sinusitis sufferer, first discovered the medicinal power of peppers while filming a live self defense pepper spray demonstration for a FOX News affiliate in Albany, New York. Just moments before the filming was to take place, Perry was stricken with one of his horrible headaches.

“I went through with the demonstration, and the pepper hurt like hell, but I immediately noticed my headache was gone. It was totally gone, and the constant one sided nasal congestion I always got with the headaches was also gone. I felt like it was some sort of miracle. Believe it or not, I owe my life to hot peppers. They did for me what no other medicine could ever do, and now I feel like I have to spread the word about the power of peppers,” says Perry.

Perry’s love for hot peppers is apparent in everything he does — he even sports a large tattoo featuring Chile peppers woven together with tribal overtones.

“The more I’ve learn about the medicinal properties of capsaicin, the more excited I get. It’s simply incredible stuff. We know how the capsaicin in sinus buster relieves headaches and sick sinus symptoms, but that’s just scratching the surface of what hot peppers can do. Capsaicin may even prove to have potential cancer fighting abilities as some studies have shown. At the very least, I’ve seen first hand what it can do for people who suffer from a multitude of chronic sinus and headache conditions,” adds Perry.

Since Perry first began marketing his Sinus Buster formula, his company, SiCap Industries has been flooded with thousands of letters, emails, and phone calls from people praising the Sinus Buster as their “life saver”.

One believer is Bob Haines of Altamont, New York. Haines had been a long time aquaintance of Perry’s when Wayne first decided to mass produce his hot pepper nasal spray, and at that time Haines thought Perry was a little nuts until he found out the spray also helped his own son.

“The first time Wayne told me about sinus buster I didn’t know what to think. I mean it sounded pretty crazy to me, but I knew he had those headaches for a long time and he swore the pepper spray cured him. So I took him at his word. He had been a news reporter for a long time here in Albany, and I trusted him, but I still wasn’t convinced. Anyway, my oldest son had suffered from severe headaches that would send him laying down in a dark room in gut wrenching pain. He had them ever since he hit puberty, and they were getting worse, so I gave a bottle of sinus buster to my kid and the next day I knew Wayne had a miracle on his hands. Nothing had ever worked for my son and I mean nothing, but the sinus buster did the trick, and because of hot peppers, my son is a changed person. That’s when I went to Wayne and offered to give up everything to join his company. Now less than a year later, we’ve had thousands of customers who’ve also had their lives changed by the sinus buster just like it did for my son,” says Haines, now VP of Manufacturing for SiCap Industries.

The Sinus Buster is also a hit with the media being recently featured in the Wall Street Journal, and on the Today Show.

“The sinus buster shows up in the news all over the place. We’ve been in magazines, newspapers, and in dozens of tv news reports all over the world. Lots of medical magazines and on websites. Evertime somebody in the media tries the sinus buster, they want to tell their audience about it because it really works. It’s about as close to a miracle as you’re gonna get,” adds Bob Haines

Ari Le Vaux | 10/28/2004

As nutrient-rich as they are delicious, hot peppers also trigger an endorphin rush in your brain that’s chemically related to runner’s high and heroin’s kick. Yes, the pepper is truly a friend of the people. Consequently, the people have helped spread peppers from their native South America to everywhere else, especially Asia.

I like to eat peppers every day of the year. So before the summer season whizzes by in a capsicum haze of chiles rellenos and ema datse, I must stock up. This annual effort to squirrel away my yearly pepper needs has led me to something very special: the pickled pepper.

Me without my pickled peppers would be like Eddie Van Halen without his guitar. But being a pickled-pepper star isn’t all groupies and glory. It takes a year of work to amass a year’s supply. Pepper seeds, ordered in winter, take all spring and summer to mature. Garlic must be planted in fall for inclusion in next year’s pickled-pepper jar.

Alternatively, you can go down to a farmer’s market and get what you need there.

As our native predecessors prided themselves on using every part of their kill, so too do I use the entire contents of that pepper jar. The peppers themselves, whether garnished or co-munched (chewed together with your food), provide savory acidic counterbalance to the rich, fatty foods we love. Sometimes I pickle carrots in the jar with peppers, and those carrots are great for co-munching too, having picked up the heat from the peppers. A bite of food, a bite of carrot now chew!

Meanwhile, many a great meal begins with chopped bacon in a pan, followed with chopped pickled peppers. And a pour of pepper-jar vinegar, tangy and sweet and speckled with floating mustard seeds, improves almost any marinade.

My current darling jar is a combo I call hotties and sweeties. It contains hot, red Arledge chili peppers and sweet Klari Baby Cheese peppers, which look like orange tomatoes and taste like candy. The only drawback of the hotties and sweeties is the fact that the minute you crack the lid, the contents fly out of the jar into the mouths of ravenous bystanders. You must guard them with your life.

If you don’t have these particular varieties of pepper at your disposal, don’t despair. When I give you a recipe, what I’m really offering is the truth behind the recipe. It’s your job to play with this truth and tweak it to your liking. There are a lot of peppers out there and much research to be done. Come January, you can order your Arledge and Klari Baby Cheese seeds from FedcoSeeds.com.

In the meantime, there are many hotties and sweeties you can substitute for my choices. Hotties should be red, with the stocky, fleshy build of a jalapeno. Sweeties should be vine-ripened and juicy, never green.

In addition to your peppers, you need the following things to pickle them:

A large canning pot

Mason jars, ideally quart or pint,

with lids and rings

Cider vinegar

Sweetener

Yellow and black mustard seeds

Garlic

Wash the peppers. On a clean cutting board, cut off the tops, just below the leafy collar. Hotties and small sweeties can be left whole. Cut the larger sweet peppers into halves, quarters, or slices. Put the peppers in a big bowl and sprinkle with salt — about three tablespoons per gallon of peppers. Stirring and draining occasionally, let the bowl sit for a few hours in a cool place while the salt pulls moisture from the pepper flesh.

Pack your peppers into clean, sterilized Mason jars, with a few raw cloves of garlic per jar. Leave about 3/4 inch of “head space” between the top of the peppers and the rim of the jar. Add a tablespoon each of yellow and black mustard seeds per quart.

Meanwhile, bring a 50/50 mixture of cider vinegar and water to a simmer. I like cider vinegar because it makes the best-tasting pickles. Sweeten the syrup with sugar, until it tastes a little sweet. Pour the hot syrup into the jars, covering the peppers but still leaving 1/2 inch of head space.

Wipe the rims, put the lids and rings on the jars, and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. Remove, cool, and store in a cool dark place.

Repeat until you have over 100 quarts. It still won’t be enough.

By Nancy Berkoff, Freedom Communications
October 20, 2004
You don’t need to turn on the stove to add sizzle to dishes — just chop some hot peppers.

Hot peppers date back to about 7000 B.C. in Central America and have been heating things up ever since.

As a rule, the smaller the pepper, the hotter it is (good hot things come in small packages). About 80 percent of pepper “heat ” — chemically, for you science buffs, called “capsaicin ” — is contained in the seeds and the veins.

If you want to take some of the sting out of your peppers, either remove both the seeds and veins, choose milder types of peppers (such as bells or Anaheim chilies) or cook or freeze them, which diminishes the heat.

There are more than 200 cultivated varieties of fresh and dried hot peppers. Remember that dried hot peppers are at least 10 times as potent as fresh ones. Store dried hot peppers in an airtight container in a dry, cool place and they’ll last up to six months. Fresh hot peppers, which should be firm, brightly colored and have no blemishes, may be stored in the refrigerator for up to three weeks.

Many people are familiar with thick-skinned and medium hot (yes, medium!) jalapeños. Found in Southwestern, Mexican and Tex-Mex cuisines, jalapeños add zip to salsa, breads and sauces. Ripe red jalapeños have a sweeter flavor; when dried and smoked, the red versions are known as “chipotles.”

Habanero hot peppers can be dark green, red or yellow (depending on ripeness). They look like mini-lanterns and are used in Caribbean and South American salsas, chutneys and marinades. Habaneros are HOT, estimated to be 50 to 60 times as hot as jalapeños.

Poblanos are well-known for their roles in chili relleno and mole. They can range in color from dark green to purple, and when smoked are known as “anchos.”

Thai hot peppers are hotter than jalapeños but milder than habaneros and give the heat in Southeast Asian curries and soups.

Interesting note: Capsaicin, the “heat ” factor in chili, triggers your brain to produce endorphins, the body’s natural pain killer. Capsaicin is currently being used in sports cream to reduce the pain of minor injuries.

I do not recommend, however, that you rub a jalapeño on your sprained ankle.

But maybe eating some killer salsa would help!