I’ve written about how Son #2 always has to eat the same thing I’m eating. Recently, Son #2 saw me eating pickled jalapeño pepper slices.
I was talking to a man at the table next to ours, and Son #2 wouldn’t stop asking me for one. He kept interrupting our conversation, pointing at the slices and asking for a bite.
I obliged. He popped it in his mouth and started chewing. I was impressed. I made a “hmph” sound, raised my eyebrows in surprise, and nodded my head to show my respect for his ability to eat anything. Then I turned away and kept talking.
Thirty seconds later, I looked at him again. His face was the color of a bright red tomato.
His lips puckered inward. A look of anxious desperation filled his eyes.
His hands were suspended in the air halfway between him and me, almost as if he had frozen despite the heat he was experiencing.
I grabbed a napkin and told him to spit the pickled devil out of his mouth. He expelled the slice of pickled jalapeño and forty gallons of saliva. He hadn’t dared swallow.
This incident reminded me of a story I wrote earlier this year:
Last year, we bought a habanero pepper plant, and at one point, it had over thirty peppers on it. We ate them raw, made salsa, and tried to give some away. But not many people in Southern Missouri take a likin’ to habaneros. And I have to admit that my first chip full of the habanero salsa took my mouth on a ride through Death Valley during its peak of summer hotness. At least it felt like it.
It reminded me of when I went to B-Dubs and got their Carolina Reaper Hot Wings.
The server came up to our table. “What can I get for you?”
I felt adventurous. “I’ll take one of your Carolina Reapers.”
“One order?”
“Yeah. And I want the rest of them to be Sweet BBQ.” I had never been to Buffalo Wild Wings.
I didn’t realize that you couldn’t split an order like that. I didn’t know I had requested one order of “Fire and Brimstone vaporizing your mouth” PLUS another order of something that tasted like a normal, lovely, relaxing backyard BBQ. He brought both of the orders to my ignorant self.
After one bite of pulverizing, hellish heat, I opened my mouth to scream and unintentionally blew a column of fire across the table at my lovely bride. Poor thing, it took a while for her eyebrows to grow back.
Twenty-eight glasses of water later, the sweat still poured down my face. I was drenched.
“Waiter,” I whispered through fried vocal cords and raised my hand in case he couldn’t hear me. My voice was raspy at best. He saw my feeble hand.
“Yeah?”
“Do you have a bucket of ice, oh, I don’t know, about seven feet deep and three feet wide?”
“No, we don’t.”
I leaned forward and grabbed his shirt around the front buttons near the collar.
“Why not, for heaven’s sake?” I yelled as loud as I could. “Don’t you know people need relief after ordering that God-forsaken plate full of garbage?”
“No one ever orders it.” He squirmed. “You’re the first.”
I let go and fell back into the booth. I asked God to forgive me for everything I’d ever done wrong.
“Charity,” my voice was thin and faint. “I think we need to get home before the Reaper reaches the other end of me.”
So we got up and made it home just in time for the nuclear bomb to blow our house to smithereens if you know what I mean.
I shudder just thinking about it.
So this year, we got milder peppers because I’m not getting any younger. And just in case any of those peppers decide to get hotter than they’re supposed to, we bought ten tomato plants that will hopefully produce enough tomatoes to tone down the heat.
But here’s a word of advice. If you’re a man in your 50s and dread getting a colonoscopy, go to B-Dubs and order some Carolina Reaper wings.
I’m certain that nothing will be able to withstand the heat.
to anyone sensitive to the higher Scoville Heat Unit rankings,
– Caleb
caneymountainblog.com 