Hot! Hot! Chili Hands!
In this household we’re fans of spicy food. In our fridge you’ll almost always find an old olive jar containing finely chopped peppers that range in colour from lime-green, though orange to deep red. It’s a condiment that Mario introduced us to, based on the hot relish that accompanies the salt and pepper on almost every Peruvian dinner table and adapted to include ingredients that can be found at our local vegetable market in Madrid. The exact recipe is secret, of course, but at its heart is the rocoto pepper, an aromatic little South American chili which packs a bit of a punch but isn’t so hot that you can’t appreciate its fruity flavour.
With our olive jar running low the other day, I went to our usual market stall and bought a large handful of the little crimson peppers they had on offer that day. The stallholder handed me the chilis with a little nod of what I thought was respect, but in retrospect may well have been concern.
Back home, I set about chopping up the little devils. Now I know cookery books usually advise using gloves when chopping chilis, but I’ve never thought them necessary. Yes, occasionally I feel a bit of a tingle in the hands, but as long as I take care not to stick a finger in my eye or absent-mindedly scratch my more sensitive parts, I’ve never found the sensation to be particularly unpleasant.
A jar-full calls for 6 peppers, but these were small so I added an extra one for good measure. Somewhere around the third chili I start to feel that familiar tingle. It occurs to me that the tingle is rather more intense than usual, and by the time I finish chopping my hands are stained red and decidedly hot. Half and hour later it feels like a fire is raging from my fingertips to my wrists. Plunging my hands into cold water provides relief for a minute or two but as soon as the water starts to approach room temperature the burning sensation returns. An hour after chopping, I’m unable to go for more than 30 seconds without running to the cold water tap. Mely, who is cleaning the kitchen at the time and I suspect thinks I’m trying to get out of my weekly flat-cleaning duties, offers some useful advice;
“Just try to calm down and ignore it, and I’m sure the pain will go away soon.”
I try this, but when I go over the thirty-second threshold I start emitting a high-pitched wail, somewhere between a boiling kettle and a cat whose tail has just been stomped on.
Mely looks worried and says I have a strange expression. The expression of someone who’s being burned alive, I suppose. She suggests we go to hospital. I refuse and say I’m sure I’ll be alright in a bit, but really it’s because I imagine myself sitting there for hours in the waiting room at Accidents and Emergencies with my hands in a bucket full of ice cubes, wailing softly. I know I’d be there for hours, because I’d be right at the bottom of the triage list. After all, my hands aren’t really burning. In fact, apart from being a little pink, they look fine, and I know the pain will subside in a while.
But it doesn’t. I cut the peppers around five in the afternoon. At dinner time, I have to eat with my hands in a bucket of water, only taking them out for the few seconds I need to feed myself a mouthful. At one in the morning I’m still blazing. We’d been planning to get up before dawn the next morning for a hiking trip to the mountains, but sleep seems out of the question and I’m starting to wonder if cutting my hands off wouldn’t be less painful. Mely has a better idea, and looks up a cure for chili burns on the internet. Fortunately, if you ever find yourself suffering the same fate, the aptly-named Buuuuurrrrnging Hot – leading Malaysian neocon blog has some sage advice. (I was in a desperate situation, seeking advice from a neocon website!)
Here’s what you do: First, it’s good to know that capsaicin – the chemical that puts the heat into chili peppers, isn’t soluble in water, which is why the cold tap only provided temporary relief, but it does dissolve in milk fat and alcohol.
We only had skimmed milk, so I moved on to Buuuurrrrning Hot author Scott Thong’s second step: rubbing with salt to get rid of any traces of capsaicin. After a while I added some olive oil to help the salt stick to my hands. My oily, salt-encrusted hands smelt good and probably would have been delicious after twenty minutes or so on a roasting tray, but as soon as I washed off the mix the burning returned, although it wasn’t as bad as before.
Onto the third step: alcohol. The stronger the better. We had an unopened bottle of gin that had been sitting around in the drinks cupboard for several months, so I poured half of it into our largest saucepan, dunked in my hands and… aaaahhhhhhhhhhhh! Instant relief! And after half an hour sitting with my hands in gin, the burning was completely cured and I could go to bed without resorting to the 4th step… drinking the remaining gin.
Next time I’ll wear gloves!
Photos taken with the new Diana f+ toy camera I’ve been playing around with recently.
A Well-stocked Cupboard (or Peace of Mind)
The latest Wall Project theme is ‘Full’, and while I ruminate the possibilities of the concept, here’s a picture that I reckon fits the brief: our kitchen cupboard, shortly after a visit to the supermarket.
While I’m more of a “leave it until things run out” kind of a guy, Mely is a firm believer in maintaining the food cupboards filled to bursting point. I must admit, it does give me a certain peace of mind to know that in the event of a global collapse of pasta, breakfast cereal and tinned veg supplies, we’d be able to keep going for a good few weeks. I worry a bit about the durability of that sagging shelf though…
The kitchen is also full of televisions, both of which belong to the flat (not to us), and neither of which work, but for some reason can’t be disposed of and so have to stay there on top of the cupboard providing unusual decoration.
End of the Day, Beginning of the Night
I took this picture last October, not long after we moved to Madrid, and it made the wall for the first Wall Project assignment: “City Life”. Madrid is full of quirky little bars, and the place in the photo isn’t exactly typical – in fact its a chain pub, one the 100 Montaditos franchise. The scene, however, is repeated on practically every street in the city, on every night of the week. Whether winding down at the the end of the day, or warming up for the night ahead, the evening ritual is the same: a cold beer, served more often than not with a complementary tapa to nibble on, and then its off to the next place to check out what’s going on there.
While the bars seem to remain packed despite the economic gloom, this year’s particularly persistent winter has emptied the pavement terraces, but the weather over last few days (though definitely not today…) suggests that the long overdue spring is finally on its way and these outdoor tables will soon be full again.
Sugar Snow
On Monday it snowed here in Madrid. It started when I was on my way to work, and made my mid-morning journey between classes, through glass and steel business parks on the city’s north-eastern fringes, more scenic (and slippery) than usual. However, I didn’t have my camera with me, and by the time I got home the fluffy snowflakes had turned to sleety rain, leaving only mushy grey remnants of what was once snow.
So here’s a photo of sugar snowmen in the window of ‘Caramelos Paco‘, Madrid’s most picturesque sweet shop. Tastier and more cheerful than snowy business parks, I think.
