Pretty poblanos. One of our neighbors brought us two bags of fresh, bright red chile peppers from her garden, poblanos for me, habaneros for Bill. I can’t handle habaneros, literally. They’re off the Scoville heat scale, and he’ll have to deal with them. The Scoville scale is a measure of the heat of a chile pepper, which depends upon the amount of capsaicin in the pepper. It's named after its inventor, American chemist Wilbur Scoville. Sweet peppers--such as the green, red, and yellow bell peppers--have no capsaicin; their Scoville rating is zero. The habaneros, among the hottest peppers known, are rated in the 200,000 range on the Scoville scale. Poblanos come in at a paltry 500. Even wimps like me can handle them.
I halved and seeded the poblanos, dried them in the dehydrator, and put them through the blender, then the coffee grinder, to make chile powder. A pound and a half of fresh peppers became three ounces of chile powder in less than 24 hours. I call it hot. Bill calls it sweet and fruity. It's all a matter of taste.
Book report. The copyedited manuscript of Wormwood is supposed to arrive today. Alice, my botanical fact-checker, has already read the manuscript and pronounced it (mostly) free of errors. The project needs to go back on Monday, so you can guess what I'll be doing this weekend. We had to arrange a quick turn-around because of the Thanksgiving holiday--the publisher (in what is no doubt a cost-cutting move) is giving everybody some extra holiday time off. Another project in the works, The Tale of Applebeck Orchard, has moved into its cover-art phase. Peggy Turchette will be doing the cover and the map again. I loved her dragon on the cover of Briar Bank--hope you liked it too. All this scurrying around means less time to work on Holly Blues, but I'm making progress. The book is about half done.
In case you missed it, I'm blogging over at Story Circle's new blog, Telling HerStories, once a week (for now--may move to biweekly in a few weeks). My most recent post: Securities (of which there seem to be fewer these days). We subtitled the blog "A Broad View," and included a quote from Meta Wagner: "A broad is someone who knows who she is, and so no one would think of asking her to be someone she's not." We've had some negative responses to the word "broad." I'm curious. What's your take on that word? Do you find it offensive? Off-putting?
Reading note. To me, writing is about how we see. The writers I want to read teach me how to see--see the world differently. In my writing there is no separation between how I observe the world and how I write the world. We write through our eyes. We write through our body. We write out of what we know.--Terry Tempest Williams