I’ve written before about the male tendency to grab stuff off the ground and put it into our mouths for a taste before the women with us can slap it out of our hands. I realized that this guy behavior was universal when i was working at Oracle and was talking with an Indian programmer whose wife was a consultant on an assignment back east for a month. She’d just called him up and ranted about how she did not want to come home and find him dead on the kitchen floor, poisoned from some food he’d let develop pathogens and then eaten anyhow.
This came up again for me recently when i was experimenting with some more green strawberries that Poli Yerena had given me, this time trying for a salsa that i could seal hot in jars so it would keep. See, i don’t worry about poisoning myself, but i do want to take good care of my friends. Besides, it’d be harder to give the stuff away if word got out about fatalities.
I’d picked up some first-of-the-season little Thai peppers, thinking i’d use them in the salsa, so i chopped up a couple. And realizing i needed to test their “hotness”, i picked up one of the disks about a millimeter thick and put it in my mouth.
I did not chew it up.
Oh no, there was not time to chew it.
The instant it hit my tongue, the pain blossomed. And alas, in order to spit it out, i had to close my mouth around it, which allowed it to contact the roof of my mouth and my gums, spreading the pain.
I leaped to the sink and guzzled water from the tap, and when that didn’t work, i stuck a fingerful of peanut butter in there in hopes of soothing the shrieking tissues, but what that got me was peanut-butter-flavored pain. So, hell, i just went back to work, trying to focus on making the salsa to take my mind off my mouth.
The next day i was in Star Stream and mentioned this adventure to Remi’s excellent counterman, Alec, who it turns out could sympathize because a few years ago he’d gone to Panama and was sitting out in a lovely garden beneath a cashew tree and noticed that it had fruit on it. He picked one and sampled it but found it unappetizing, so he fished the nut out and bit into it. And was in agony from the acid burns from the raw nut, which seared his mouth and left it inflamed for days.
The green strawberry salsa? It turned out tasty but totally wimpy since i’d made it with Pasilla chiles while my mouth was still burning from the Thai peppers. Next time i’ll compromise and make it with jalapeños. We live and learn. Well, sometimes.
Some posts across the street from Star Stream: