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It’s time for my Tuesday meme….Heads or Tails. This week Barb [aka Skittles] has the option is:
HEADS – Anything starting with the letter O
as in:
OMG!
Now, honestly, my family loves the ‘hot and spicy’. The hotter and spicier the food is, the better it tastes/tasted. We even had a ritual when a new member joined the family. Seriously. And it involved jalapeno peppers. Grown in my father’s acre garden yearly. You see, if you keep the seeds in the pepper when freezing or canning, the hotter they remain. We’d use jalapenos a LOT in cooking, snacking, eating. I have two sisters-in-law of the Spanish American descent, and one really knows how to cook! She has taught me how to make everything under the sun, including my own homemade tortillas…right up to fresh, homemade sopapillas! In fact she is the one that got us started with our ‘love affair’ with Mexican peppers and all their uses in some of the best meals this side of Timbuktu!!
Oh, the ritual was….picture this. My Dad at the dining room table, catching up on all the news we could use with family things, etc. In walks the ‘new’ person. We all gather around the table and just spend hours chatting, eventually bringing out the beers and the cards and playing while snacking. Soon, it’s ritual time! Dad brings out the jalapeno peppers. He takes the whole pepper, seed and all, by the stem, and bites down. Consuming the whole thing. [There have been times his eyes would water and he'd break out in a sweat the pepper was so spicy!]. He’d then take a big swig of his icy beer that was sitting so conveniently at his side.
Then, as we all knew what would come next, except for the new guy, the test began….
“Here, try these Bud.” “They’re crisp, tender, juicy and delicious”….”Trust me.”, as he hands Bud the jalapeno.
Bud or the new guy, would take my Dad’s word for it, and bite in. We all sat in anticipation, waiting for the sweat to ooze and the tongue to swell with the heat, and then it hits!!!
Gulping and reaching for the beer…”WoW, that puppy’s hot!”
And we all laughed.
—
There, you know now I grew up with spicy foods! And Bud and I are totally disappointed in the so called Mexican Food Restaurants AND the salsa and picante sauces that are found on the grocery shelves around here in south Texas. Why, they don’t know what hot is. It’s all mislabeled here. They have printed on the labels –”HOT” and has the red ‘warning’ lid/cap on the bottles. So the consumer knows it’s hot and spicy. We laugh. The stuff doesn’t even give us a buzz! Mild. Way too mild.
Until just the other day…
We’re at H E B [a local grocery chain in Texas that began here in Corpus] store. I was just going up and down the aisles looking for ‘munchies’. Nachos sounded fantastic. I pick up the ‘low in fat’ corn chips and some non fat refried beans. I was then thinking of making my own salsa. But, I spied this at the canned tomato section —-
It’s store brand, but the label says “Extra Hot”. I read the back side, actually just the ingredients to make sure there was no MSG in the processing. I didn’t read the KIND of peppers used. But the extra hot got me. I thought, it’d be good for dipping and topping our nachos. I got it home, opened the can, drained the juice in a coffee cup. As I was making the salsa I sipped some of the juice….that’s where the “O” comes in this week….
OMG!!! It burned, it burned all the way down. I could feel my innards heat up as the juice went down the esophagus. FIRE!!! Next two words spoken by me was “hory sh!t” [yes, hory, my tongue was stinging so badly the 'L' turned into an 'R'] Then, I turned the can around, clearing the tears away…reading more—
This is where I choked. As always, there is a ‘need’ to refrigerate the unused leftovers. BUT!! It also says at the bottom of the label to store in PLASTIC CONTAINER…I’M thinking…no way José!!! it’d EAT right through the plastic!! Why, it even singed the hair out my nose!! Reason – Habanero peppers!!! [the hottest of all peppers]
But, oh was it all ever so good, after the first shock wave. VERY good. For caution’s sake, I consumed some ice cream for dessert. And by next morning I was begging for the ice cream to hurry and pass through my system, believe me!!!
