The most popular are grown in and around the village
of Ibarra, Spain. Tangy, bright, a verdant green, anywhere
from two to six inches long, smooth, with tender skin.
When her father explains she must not call him papá, he means
Quindilla Pepper, we need to work as a team. By which he means
the audience should perceive her as verdant green
and tender, just a young Spanish wife married to a slightly
older man. And he does mean slightly, of course, his muscles
tone, his legs like the legs of an Adonis in his thirties: tangy,
bright, lithe. Such a lucky woman, the audience will whisper,
to possess a swooning Spaniard moving her body gracefully
around the casino dance floor. The Dancing Cansinos.
Two manzanilla olives pitted, one anchovy having no visible
bones (shaped into an S), and four quindilla peppers run
through with a four-inch toothpick, one end pointed,
the other end flat. The skewered creation is laid on a plate,
then drizzled in fresh extra-virgin olive oil. This is how you make
a Gilda, a world famous pintxo. Father and daughter tangoing,
man and wife tangoing—mother left at home.
A Recipe Using Quindilla Peppers
Kimberly Ann Priest is a writer and photographer whose book Wolves in Shells won the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry from the University of Nebraska Press. She is the author of tether & lung (Texas Review Press) and Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications). An assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures at Michigan State University, her poetry has appeared in Copper Nickel, Poetry Wales, Prairie Schooner, and Birmingham Poetry Review.