Well, let’s just say, I didn’t know much about chili peppers at the time. If you’re not up on it, let me educate you real quick. Heat in peppers is measured in scovilles. The chili pepper that the recipe called for has a scoville rating starting at 500.
Cayenne? Well, that rates in at about 50,000.
And I doubled it up.
Oops.
Going to be tasty right?
So I hadn’t tasted this concoction. I Wanted to savor my cooking success. Give my husband first taste. It looked beautiful. A nice colorful dish. Sure to impress. I was pretty pleased with myself.
So I served it up. I set a nice table. Beautifully decorated. With a spectacular looking dish I had slaved over.
We sat down to eat.
My husband took a big bite and…
Have you ever seen someone go into convulsions from eating something too spicy?
Well, I think I may have.
Turns out 50,000 scovilles of cayenne pepper is a lot.
Enough heat to burn a polar bear’s butt!
We sat down to dinner.
My husband poured on the compliments. The meal looked wonderful. It smelled amazing.
I was pretty proud.
So he dug in. I was taking my time and enjoying the accomplishment.
Instantly his face went beet red.
Me: “How is it?”
Him: “Wonderful” (as he started to sweat)
I had seen that red face before. On our honeymoon, he took some vitamins and ended up with an extreme niacin reaction.
Looked like this
We didn’t know what it was at the time. His whole body turned red and he was so hot he just went out and laid in the snow. We were at Lake Tahoe. He spent that weekend packing himself with snow.
This looked a lot like that.
For a moment I thought about the ingredients. No, no niacin.
He took another bite.
I didn’t cook often. So he made sure to eat it up and pour on the compliments when I did.
What was wrong?
Then his face went flush and he started to shake a little. Still claiming the food was great.
I took a bite.
Cough cough. I spit it out and ran to the kitchen for milk.
OMG!
HOT!!!
And I wasn’t talking about George Clooney!
I grabbed the plates and cleared the table. Got him some milk. We went out to dinner.
Clearly, I had got something wrong. I had used the wrong ingredient. And the results were pretty bad.