Red Leopard

I was looking in my archives for a snickerdoodle recipe. Rummaging through those old sites was nostalgic and horrifying. The very first sites were hosted on Earthlink. I don’t even know the URL any more. The later sites have all been on Hurricane Electric.

I pushed the first Red Leopard website out on October 29, 2000 using Microsoft Publisher 98. Yikes! What a dog’s breakfast. Eventually, I migrated to Notepad and by 2002 had a site that I liked. A static site but I liked it. I was horrible at CSS but improved my skills in raw HTML.

When I jumped into Moveable Type in June 2003, I didn’t bring the old material over.

Too bad. It was a simpler time. I wrote about the things that delighted me. Here’s one example, republished from March 2003:

Ahhh. The Preciosa brand jalapeño is perhaps the tastiest jalapeño on the market. This is no ad copy. It comes from the heart. I’ve tried every brand of pepper at the mega-Albertsons just down the road. Most of the brands leave me cold but the Preciosa makes my mouth water just thinking about them.

It starts when you open the can. There is this Valdez class oil slick, a green layer of 100% jalapeño flavor covering the bounty. And I don’t just mean flavor like flavor that tickles the taste bud, but that kind of flavor that’s fat and chewy. You poke a cheese stick down in that vat and it comes out looking like a pepper popsicle.

Each pepper has been pickled just right. Not so much that it’s sloppy with no tooth. Not so little that it’s too young and lacks depth. No, these peppers are righteous and wise. Their character is summed in one word: Seasoned.

There is nothing tame about the Preciosa. It is definitely outside the bell curve. If you cannot order “spicy hot” at the local Thai joint, you may want to pass. But if the current can of jalapeños in your fridge has all the excitement of a rice cake, give these diablos a try.