Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Food Safety 101 with Jeremy

Let me start by saying that I love my husband, really. One of the symbiotic elements of our relationship has always been that he's the guy with all the answers (the smart one) and I'm the one always posing questions (the smart, but in a different way one). He seems to know a little about everything, and a lot about how make things up.

We are also a household that googles and wiki's everything. What I did before the internet, I have no idea. One time just for fun we googled all the references in the song 'we didn't start the fire' just for more historic information on the lyrics we didn't understand. Fun right?

So I guess you would call us knowledgeable, but I definitely wouldn't use the word smart. Smart would imply that we are immune to doing very stupid things.

For instance when you receive a package from your spice retailer, in which is included a free sample of something you've never heard of, it is NOT smart to spread it all over some grilled eggplant and serve it to your family.

If you are my knowledgeable (but not always smart) husband you might do that. Luckily the one person to ingest a large quantity of this....


...was Jeremy, via several pieces of grilled eggplant. Before he could notice something amiss he had eaten two pieces. Shortly thereafter he began to prance around the kitchen, curse, cry and shovel lemon flavored yogurt down his gullet.

What was this mysterious red powder, given to us for free by our spice retailer, that caused my husband such terrible pain? None other than Bhut Jolokia, THE WORLD'S HOTTEST PEPPER POWDER. All over our eggplant...as in mine, Tessa's and yes even Charley's. Luckily nobody else had eaten any or stuck it their eye or nose.

Following some research on Bhut Jolokia I can tell you that it:
--is 400 times hotter than Tabasco sauce
--holds a place in the Guinness book of world records
--used in India on fences to deter elephants
--is being developed into non lethal smoke bombs and pepper sprays for use by India's military


I reminded Jeremy that in the future it is a good idea to know WHAT we are eating before serving it to the family. I'm pretty sure he saw the word India and thought it was a curry powder. Wrong.