Those Thais sound good. With fresh birds' eyes I also like the reds best - a lot of difference from the greens (sorry green!) which always fill out the supermarket chile packs. One makes a feature of the red ones while using the green ones for cooking. Pickled chiles have their uses for convenience, for immediacy, and for flavour. For instance, tonight there'll be some fresh jalapeņos to jazz up our chile verde (the recent posts reminded me to do this with more sale Anaheims from the good folks at Waitrose - I'll eat them away from my baby Anaheim plants' view), but it will be preceded by pickled jalapeņos in the salsa. Yum. Cheers, "assembly" Virginia