My friend, and supervisor at the time, had a real green thumb. When you entered his house it was through the garden. It didn't matter if you came in through the back or front door. The man had plants, vegetables, flowers, and spices growing everywhere. It was truly amazing to watch him do his thing. So much life.
My buddy's overabundance one year in peppers led me to write this tale. I had stopped by to drink some beer on a sunny day when he offered me a box full of peppers of all varieties covering the whole scoville scale to take home, otherwise they were going to rot and become compost if I didn't. He threw in a bunch of tomatoes as well since we had come up with the idea of me making a big thing of salsa with it.
I went back to my little Japanese house and began researching the different ways to make salsa.
I know, I know. Salsa is pretty basic but I wanted this to be more than just pepper and tomato puree. The internet in my little neighborhood was pretty slow at the time waiting for the modem to dial out and for the limited amount of cooking sites to appear after clicking through AltaVista for like a million years was almost enough to stop me from completing this mission. Search engines and published cooking sites weren't the norm. However, I pushed through the dark age of web surfing and got a nice recipe from a cooking forum in AOL...where all the old people still are! Ha!
So, back to the kitchen and chopping my peppers up I made sure to wash my hands after handling the habanero peppers. I knocked out the onions and tomatoes and gave them a short sizzle in the pan with garlic to get the flavor up. In went the ten varieties of peppers to the pot to get them soft and steam out a little juice so the base wouldn't be runny. My stove didn't have an overhead fan so I would occasionally take off the lid to the pot and fan away the steam so the paint on my ceiling wouldn't peel away.
I had just transferred the onions and tomatoes in to the big pot with all the peppers when the aroma really picked up. I didn't even have to fan anything to smell all those sweet treats simmering together. It was too much to resist so I lifted up the lid and leaned in to the simmering pot and took a deep smell. The steam rolled up and around my face. My hair was even a little damp from the burst of steam.
I replaced the lid and straightened up. I blinked my eyes twice as they were a little fuzzy and my face a bit tingly. I rubbed both my eyes with my fingertips (since I thought washing my hands once would be enough to get rid of all the capsaicin) and immediately felt the heat building in my eyes. I went to the sink to splash my eyes when my whole face began to burn. I tried to open my eyes to see where the knobs were and grab the soap but my face was quickly turning in to a three alarm fire and I could barely see. I took off for the bathroom to get cleaned and try to cool my face off. I began splashing soapy water all over my face and rubbing it in my eyes and things seemed to get better.
I decided to sit down on the toilet and relieve myself after having been in the kitchen cooking for almost two hours and drinking beer.
Hey, I sit down because I don't like making a mess and I was married at the time so it's just easier to do that than have an argument about the toilet seat being up!
I reached down and gave my solider a shake or two before standing up.
That's when everything hit me.
The burning sensation on my face returned and my eyes started to close up again. And now, adding color, my groin was rapidly joining the forest fire raging on my body. There was no time to lose! I flushed the toilet and turned around to use the little sink that was built right in to the top to try and extinguish the flames (seriously, toilets in Japan have a little sink right on the top so when you flush they automatically turn on practically demanding that you wash your hands every time).
There was no putting out this fire no matter how much I was splashing water on my face and nether regions.
I ran through the house with my pants off straight for the shower room (another cool part about Japanese culture is your bath and shower are all in the same enclosed room so you can have a full on water party with up to six people).
I turned on the shower head and took off the rest of my clothes.
Sitting there on the floor with the water and soap bubbles circling around me, whimpering, is where my ex-wife found me. I'm sure she was interested in knowing why I was taking a shower at 4 in the afternoon and hence why she checked on me. It must have been a site. Me red as a tomato scrubbing myself repeatedly with soap like a man in the grips of an OCD attack and only half my clothes piled up in a wet corner of the shower room.
I tried to explain to her what had happened. I tried to explain why my junk was on fire too. None of it came out right.
When at last the fire abated and I returned to the world of the living I was red-faced again but this time out of embarrassment. I had a full pot of salsa that tasted delicious, if a bit too warm for most people, and a back story that I shouldn't share with any one. Except you, my dear reader.
Keep it secret. Keep it safe.
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