My dad is obsessed with hot peppers, but the ones he loves the most are the Italian long hots. In each batch, most of the peppers are spicy, but there are always one or two that are so ridiculously hot they could almost melt your tongue. We used to wait and see which of us got that one, because only my dad and I could tolerate that tremendous amount of heat. It was our special bond. If my brother ate the hot one, he would swear off peppers for at least three months. My mother was smart: She didn’t eat them at all.
Now that both my dad and I live on the West Coast, where these Italian long hots aren’t sold, friends back East will send us cases of them. You can’t freeze the peppers, so when they arrive, we try to eat them all right away.
