Bell Peppers "Pinot Noir"

We went to a plant sale back in May at the Harvest For the Hungry garden. There were almost as many varieties of peppers as there were tomatoes....OneTrinidad 7 Pot pod is said to provide enough heat for 7 pots of stew. There are six different colors of Habañeros--Chocolate, Caribbean Red, White Bullet, Orange. Peach, and Mustard. The Bolivian Rainbow Pepper can turn from brilliant purple to yellow to orange and finally to red when ripe, with all stages on the plant at once. 

Peppers can be long and thin, pea size, or as big as a fist. A man named Scoville invented a scale for ranking the heat of peppers ranging from 800.000 Scovilles for the 7 pot varieties to zero Scovilles for the bell peppers. I'm trying to picture how he went about doing that. Did he taste hundreds of varieties of peppers?

There are peppers from South America, India, the United States and Italy, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, the Caribbean and many places in between. There are Scotch Bonnet Peppers, Thai Dragon Peppers, Red Amazon Peppers, Bulgarian Carrot Peppers, Ho Chi Minh Hot Peppers and Corn di Toro (Horn of the Bull) Peppers.

Of course one can only go by the name on a small starter plant. with no fruit on it, so we bought a selection with names we liked...and brought them home and planted them. 
This was a good year for peppers. They all flourished, and it has been a bit of a crapshoot trying to figure out which ones are which and how hot they are.

Here  is a wonderful resource sent to me by a friend for attempting to determine which are which, or just to feast your eyes on. One of our favorite recipes is for small green Padron peppers. Fry them in olive oil until blistered and soft and sprinkle with coarse sea salt and enjoy, keeping in mind the fact that while they are generally mild, one in every ten or fifteen can be HOT. It makes eating them an adventure.

Thank you to everyone who sent good wishes to OilMan. He is all patched up and recovering well. Magic pain medication  was inserted directly before they stitched glued him back together. It is supposed to attach itself to fat globules for a slow release, and seems to be working well, although as far as I can tell, he scarcely has any fat globules.