Hot Pepper Appetizer with Garlic and Dill: Marinated Stuffed Peppers

I decided to write down how I make my hot pepper appetizer with garlic. For some mysterious reason, a treat is generally taken to mean something tasty and, as a rule, sweet. A delicacy, or something rare and hard to come by. For children it is candy, of course — I remember that from my own childhood. For adults some 20 years ago, a treat could be a sandwich with caviar or red fish, or even a shot of some exotic foreign spirit. Then again, stereotypes change with time.

I don't care much for sweets, although I won't turn them down, so for me a treat can be something quite unexpected. I may simply like a certain food very much. Usually it is something from the appetizer department, the kind of thing served before the main meal to whet the appetite. It is often assumed that such snacks have to come with strong drinks, but that is not always so. Although, to be fair, in our part of the world the very word for a snack implies a drink to go with it. But that is philosophy.

I am, to some extent, a devotee of spicy food. Spicy and fiery. My main sauce for meat is usually grated horseradish, made by an old recipe handed down from my father. The horseradish must be soaked in water, and it is mixed with red beet juice and table vinegar. Hot as fire, sharp as a dagger! Unfortunately, it is a winter condiment: I never make it before the first frosts, otherwise the flavor just isn't there.

And, of course, hot peppers. In cooking, hot pepper is often called “chili”. I read somewhere that the term properly belongs to one particular species (Capsicum frutescens), though it gets applied to all red and very hot varieties in general. In the ancient language of the Aztecs, “chilli” means “red”.

The heat of a red pepper comes from capsaicin. The more of it there is, the hotter the pepper. The degree of heat is determined by the amount of capsaicin and placed on the well-known Scoville scale, measured in Scoville units. An ordinary bell pepper, for example, scores zero. Pure capsaicin is 15 million units. Pepper spray is 2-5 million units. And Tabasco sauce is only 3-5 thousand.

My year-round spicy treat has long been simple appetizers made from small hot peppers, and this hot pepper appetizer with garlic in particular. I say “small hot peppers”, though I know perfectly well that the choice here is very modest. As a rule, you buy whatever there is, without much to pick from. A pity. It is usually hard to scare me with a hot pepper, but once friends brought something truly atomic from Mexico. It felt like swallowing a razor blade.