The GM was in town this week, so we invited him for dinner.  Mr. Curry came too and we planned on one of our favs; piri piri chicken.  So I went to the store and stocked up on all the hot peppers one needs to make piri piri sauce and I spent quite a lot of time in the afternoon, chopping jalapenos and poblanos and boiling it all up in olive oil to make the delicious and ridiculously hot sauce.  Once finished, I chopped up the jicama orange salad that gets dumped on top of the chicken cooked in the sauce.  It's the juxtaposition of the hot sauce and the cool salad that makes your mouth dance for joy, as well as the delicious taste of it all.

Everything was going swell until I put the sauce on the stove to heat it back up. Now, you only really need about a quarter cup of the stuff for an entire dinner; a little bit goes a long way.  Being lazy, I decided to heat up the entire batch so I wouldn't have to put it all away more than once. I turned the heat on 'low' and went back onto the deck to join our friends.

It was ninety degrees and very humid, but there was a breeze blowing so it was nice on the deck.  Inside the house, the air conditioning was on but we decided to eat outside because it wasn't too bad in the shade and with the breeze.

I went back into the house to check on the sauce and discovered to my dismay that I hadn't turned the heat on 'low' but 'high'.

I had burned the entire pot of sauce to a sticky, stinky crisp.

Do you know what two cups of hot pepper juice smells like when you burn it to death?

NO, YOU REALLY DON'T.

My entire house was filled with green, acrid stench, which burned your eyes, nose, throat and skin!!

I grabbed the ruined pot off the stove (it was one of my favorites.  sad.) and put it in the sink.  I managed to splash a little of the hot oil on my wrist, so I turned on the cold water to rinse it off and treat the burn; hot oil on skin =bad.

Cold water hit the pot.  This caused a new plume of green smoke to billow out of the sink, causing me to cough hard.

I realized that I couldn't wash my arms in the kitchen sink, so I ran to the bathroom to scrub my arm as Jay came into the house.  I tried to tell him that I'd ruined the sauce but I kept coughing. He figured it out.

He kept yelling at me to get out of the house, but I really wanted to scrub the oil off my arm.  It hurt.  He opened all the widows and turned on all the fans.  I got my arm washed and went out and told our dinner guests that I'd wrecked the sauce but dinner would be awesome anyway.

It was.  Instead of serving the chicken with hot sauce and salad on top, we chopped the chicken into bite sized bits and threw it right into the jicama orange salad and ate it that way.

It was delicious.

My arm burned all night but didn't blister so I think it was more the pepper juice and not the hot oil that got me.  There are four spots that are little burns but not my entire hand and wrist like I'd originally thought.  I'm not The Claw, now.

It was really fun to see the GM.

We kept the air conditioning off all night because the wind blowing through the house was the only way to get rid of the stench of burnt peppers.  THen, a big rain storm blew in around 2 a.m.  We had to close some windows to keep the rain out but I'll tell you what; no stink by morning!!

Thanks, God!

 

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