“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.
Save RecipeIngredients
- Canola or olive oil
- 1 Soyrizo Sausage (6 oz. or 1/2 a link--adjust amount to match your heat tolerance)
- 1 onion (chopped)
- 3 garlic cloves (crushed)
- 2 C. water (or more--to your taste)
- 3/4 to 1 C. small dry pasta
- 14 oz. can tomato sauce
- 3 C. vegetable stock (or more)
- 1 t. dried oregano (or basil)
- Salt and pepper to taste
- A few big handfuls to spinach (coarsely chopped)
- 1 15-ounce can red kidney beans (rinsed and drained)
- Freshly-grated Parmesan cheese
Instructions
- Heat oil in a large soup pot and saute and onion and garlic until they are soft. When the onion and garlic are cooked, stir in crumbled soyrizo sausage. Stir to mix.
- Add water, dry pasta, tomato sauce, vegetable stock, oregano and salt and pepper Bring soup to a boil and then reduce the heat. Simmer soup for about 15 minutes until the pasta is tender.
- Chop and add the fresh spinach to the soup. Add the rinsed beans. Continue cooking the soup for another 5 minutes. Add additional water or broth to thin the soup to a consistency you like.
- Ladle the soup into bowls and garnish with freshly-grated Parmesan cheese.
- Cook's Note: Soyrizo is a vegetarian substitute for chorizo. It is available at Trader Joe's and at most major supermarkets. Regular chorizo would work, too.
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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.
