[CH] Chile-head connosiuer
Pecos (pecos_b@hotmail.com)
Wed, 1 Aug 2001 09:02:08 -0400
I can recall the first time I experienced a habanero...
My ranch boss was growing a garden, and wanted to get some jalapeno plants
for it.
We found some plants labeled "very hot jalapenos", and chose a couple of
those plants along with the regulars.
After a time in the garden, things began to show. One day, my boss strolls
in with these little green, shriveled up looking bell peppers in his
hands...told me to try one...
I looked at him funny, as I hate the taste of a raw bell pepper. He was
already eating one, and said to try it...
I bit...bell pepper taste...yyyyuuuuuuuccccckkkkk! I was about to hand it
back, when he said I should keep eating, that it gets spicy...(neither of us
had ever had one of these before)
I tasted something hot and spicy, and it was goooooooood, so I ate some
more, and more, and more, til I had 3/4 of it eaten.
By that time, my mouth was burning so bad I couldn't take the rest, and had
to dispose of it. Then I proceeded to wash my hands. I washed them 5 times,
using every cleaner and industrial strength type I could find.(I knew enough
to know that I needed to get my hands thoroughly cleaned) I mainly washed
them because of an itch growing in my eye.
Once I felt my hands were sufficiently cleaned, I rubbed my eye, and it
burned for the next 2 hours...
Not to mention the entire left side of my mouth and cheek burned from the
juices...
We went outside to look at these strange, apocalypticly hot peppers that had
appeared in the garden. Somehow, in perfect ignorance, they had been planted
right between the real bell peppers and the jalapenos. Our first conclusion
was some of the bell pepper plants and jalapeno plants had merged, growing
this new pepper...
It was only after a long long search that I found out what we had actually
grown...the infamous habanero, then almost unheard of in that part of the
country. I was hooked from the first sting, and almost no hot sauce could
match the sting after that. We made salsas, cut em up in dishes, it was
great. His wife hated them tho...LOL
I use them now for a variety of dishes, mainly a dish I made up using rice
and chili, simply named.
There's my introduction into the chile-heads world.
Now I'm stuck in MD, unable to grow anything, and currently unable to get
back home.
Uncle Steve, was that offer an open one?
Pecos out-
(my mouth waters everytime I think of those peppers, and hearing that doctor
explain the 'chile-high', whether it really is true or not, made me laugh,
and caused my wife to say incredulously, 'so that explains it'...LOL)