Respect the Scotch Bonnet

Monday, March 29, 2010.....

I'm talking about the pepper, not what may happen during an intimate moment between 2 people. That could be a Thursday TMI story for LiLu, but I'm keeping my story clean and discussing the hot killer pepper which I now officially hate!

Hate is not a strong enough emotion to describe my run-in with the stupid pepper on Saturday. In my quest to try out all the Cooking Light recipes in the Jan/Feb 2010 magazine, I worked with a Scotch Bonnet pepper for the first time.

It's small, I'm large, AND yet, it kicked my ass more than my trainer ever did.

Sure, I got pepper juice on my fingers and immediately touched my eye liked an idgit. I broke Rule #1:

While handling hot peppers never touch eye, mouth or any open scratch until hands have been thoroughly washed (wow, I sounded like a 1950's ad geared towards kitchen safety for housewives).

I own my stupidity on breaking Rule #1, but you would think that after washing your hands all the pepper juice would be gone. Nope. I had the hidden cut, the cut the size of a paper cut or from a small knife while chopping positioned under my nail. The one where pepper juice could make it's way in to, but soap couldn't.

All night, burning sensation. All night scrubbing hands. All night cursing the peppers -- not only because my hands burned, but because it was a component in probably the worst dish I've tasted in ions. A dish requiring so much mincing and chopping items into julienne strips that it pushed this dish on a scale of 1 to 5 to a negative 4 (-4).

Taste ranked the dish at "0", but the prep time pushed that sucky dish down 4 more points.

I went to bed, shaking my hand (like that would stop the burning sensation) and finally realized this damn pepper beat me.

I washed my hands one last time and took aspirin. It worked, and I learned my lesson: Scotch Bonnet peppers are NOT as cute as they appear.