Feb 06 2006
The TSW culinary institute of fiery foods (or beware of the small red chiles)
Tonight, while my wife went to a business dinner, I pushed myself to the spicy food limit. I made a dish that I haven’t had for about 9-10 months: Chicken with Chiles. It’s a recipe from Fuchsia Dunlop’s excellent book Land of Plenty, and the last time I made this Sichuan dish, my wife stopped eating it after a few bites because it was too hot/spicy. I remembered it being spicy, but not “I can’t take it†spicy; more like tingle your lips for hours spicy.
So I preparing this dish tonight while my wife was getting ready. The first step: measure the chiles. The recipe calls for “1 small rice bowl filled generously with dried red chiles, preferable Sichuanese (about 2 ounces).†Since I was just making this for myself, I cut the recipe in half, which still amounted to 40 red chiles.
As I finished cooking the dish, my wife came downstairs and said “It smells good but (cough, cough) really spicy!†After cleaning the kitchen, I sit down with a beer, Chinese food, and my big screen ready to enjoy my food. Then I start eating and realize that I’m drinking the beer before and after every bite of chicken. I start picking some of the chiles out to hopefully bring the heat level down, and it helps, a little.
My wife says is smells good and she’d like to try a piece, but she doesn’t “want my mouth to be on fire at dinner.†I tell her it’s not bad in between swigs of beer and now water. She tries a small piece of chicken.
“What do you think?†I ask.
“I can only taste the chiles†she replies.
Eating this spicy treat reminded of the only other time I had something so spicy that I almost threw in the towel: In high school, my friends and I were hanging out watching Monday Night Football and decided to make nachos. But we thought it would better to have “fiery nachos.†So I asked my mom if we had any chili peppers in the house. At first she said no, but after further consideration, and some nagging on my part, my mom went to the freezer and pulled a small bag filled with five small chiles.
“Now these are really hot†she warned “only use one. No more than two.†But we were young and brass (or stupid) and diced up three chiles, mixed it in with the cheese and chips and baked the whole thing.
After a few bites one friend was asking for bread, another for a glass of milk, another asked for anything but water. I think we ate about half of the nachos all the while saying, “I can’t believe how hot this is!â€
Dude,
I totally remember that night!!!!! almost everyone was dying, and if I remember right you guys didn’t eat nachos at the monday night football parties for a while. Good Times:grin:
Were there only a few chiles? I specifically remember eating one out of the freezer - the cold quickly becoming toxically, unbearably hot. The nachos were a bit much, too.
As Brian said, good times. Good times and a glass of milk. Good times and a glass of milk and a few games of Mortal Combat on the Sega handheld.
Yeah, my lips are still burning.
i just ate one of those peppers fresh off the plant and nearly died, i hurled all over the place and drank a lot of different liquids so i feel your pain, got to to i need to throw up some more.