“Ask not (’tis forbidden knowledge), what our destined term of years,
Mine and yours; nor scan the tables of your Babylonish seers.
Better far to bear the future, my Leuconoe, like the past,
Whether Jove has many winters yet to give, or this our last;
This, that makes the Tyrrhene billows spend their strength against the shore.
Strain your wine and prove your wisdom; life is short; should hope be more?
In the moment of our talking, envious time has ebb’d away.
Seize the present; trust tomorrow e’en as little as you may.”

                                                —-Horace

Seize the day! Seems like pretty good advice in perilous times.

In that spirit, be advised that you can eat all the chiles your stomach will allow with no damage to your taste buds.

As it turns out, spicy foods don’t kill our taste buds, the culprit is most likely age. Good news. Bad news.

According to Paul Bosland, the director of the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico Sate University (I know. Who knew there was a chile pepper institute anywhere?), we’re born with around 10,000 taste buds. For much of our lives, the taste bud cells replace themselves. Eventually, though, some of the cells lose their ability to replicate and our sense of taste diminishes. Bummer.

Interestingly, Bosland puts to bed an old myth about spicy foods like hot chiles damaging one’s taste buds.  This, he says, is just not the case. Instead, he says that the active ingredient in spicy peppers, capsaicin, plays a trick on us. When we eat spicy foods, the capsaicin activates our taste receptors and sends a false danger message to our brains. Somehow, through the evolutionary process, “certain pain receptors in our nerve endings react to capsaicin in the same way they react to heat…and our brain starts producing endorphins to block that pain,” he says. That reaction causes our mouths to numb when we consume capsaicin and oftentimes we jump to the false conclusion that our taste buds are being burned to oblivion.  Not so. Who knew?

So, if spice is your thing (as it is mine), you can enjoy spicy foods with wild abandon.

Here is a great spicy soup recipe. You can also make a non-spicy version of this soup by omitting the Soyrizo.

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This soup is adapted from a recipe that appears in Julie Van Rosendaal’s and Sue Duncan’s wonderful cookbook, Spilling the Beans. Their book is available on Amazon here.

Memories.

This coronavirus crisis has given me a lot of time to explore my food (and other) memories. I imagine you have done a lot of that, too.

On a lazy afternoon recently, I asked myself where I would most like to revisit (and dine) if I had unlimited options. I settled upon a world trip that would take me back to Cairo (Egypt), Berenty Lemur Preserve ( Madagascar),  Srinagar (Kashmir, India), Yangon (Myanmar), the Galapagos Islands (Ecuador)  and Istanbul (Turkey). Whew! That would be some wonderful itinerary! And, just think of the food.

Considering that itinerary, one of my fondest food memories is the restaurant in a magical hotel in the heart of Istanbul, the Pera Palas. Built in the 1892, the hotel served as the eastern terminus for travelers on the Orient Express. Luminaries like Ataturk, Agatha Christie and Ernest Hemingway slept there. I wrote about the hotel in 2015 when I posted a baklava recipe. You can find the post here if you would like to read more about the hotel. (The baklava recipe is pretty spectacular, too.) Clearly, I was pining for the Russian salad even then. Now, five years later, I’ve tweaked  a recipe that is pretty spot on for the Pera Palas’ dish-of-my-dreams.

This salad is a traditional New Year’s dish for Russians. It’s origins can be traced back to a Belgian chef, Lucien Olivier, who operated a popular restaurant in Moscow in the 19th Century. That restaurant, The Hermitage, became the place to dine and enjoy the house’s signature salad, aptly named the Olivier salad.  Olivier struggled to keep the salad recipe secret. His salad featured black caviar, capers, game hens and potatoes as key ingredients and was dressed in a creamy “Olivier dressing.” Recreating the recipe for the dressing became an obsession for restaurant patrons. Reportedly, Olivier’s recipe was stolen by his sous chef who was able to analyze Olivier’s mise en place one day when the chef stepped away and left his personal kitchen (and recipe) vulnerable. Olivier’s supporters, however, always claimed that something was missing in the stolen version. Some said it was Kabul sauce in the dressing. Kabul sauce. Hmmm.

Over the years, the recipe has been recreated in restaurants and households across the world. The Turkish version is called Rus salatsi. That is what we enjoyed at the cavernous Pera Palas dinning room those many years ago.

Here’s the recipe adjusted to fit my memories. I have to confess, though, that Instacart let me down. They couldn’t find that Kabul sauce. Damn.

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I looked at a lot of different Russian salad recipes for inspiration. Most recently, I was inspired by this recipe: Ensalada Rusa.

Raise your hand if you could use a really good brownie about now. Me, too.

These Triple Chocolate Espresso Brownies will knock your socks off. Just reread the recipe title again. Slowly.

Triple. Chocolate. Espresso. Brownies. Whoa!

These brownies incorporate several types of chocolate and a powerful hit of espresso into a decadently-rich dessert. Texture-wise, they fall somewhere between a cakey brownie and a chocolate candy.

Lots of mental health benefits in these brownies, too.

Hats off to Mrs. Bertha Potter-Palmer. She’s the lady who put the brownie on the dessert map.  Reportedly, Mrs. Palmer asked the chef at the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago  to create a portable chocolate dessert. The Palmer House was catering boxed lunches for ladies attending the Columbian World’s Fair Exposition held in Chicago in 1893 and Bertha was looking for a special treat to pack in the boxes. (Bertha had been given the hotel as a wedding gift from her husband. Poor Bertha.)

The Palmer House Brownie was a big hit and quickly became a regular menu item at the hotel. Here is a link to Bertha’s recipe: Palmer House Brownie.  Here is a look at the gorgeous room where guests enjoyed the treat. The brownie, by the way, is still on the menu at $12 a pop.

Today, you can, of course, find many variations on the original Palmer brownie. This one is particularly delicious. Somehow I think Bertha would approve.

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This recipe is adapted from one on the Love and Olive Oil site here.