Tag: cooking tip

A Cautionary Tale

Gallery · ·

I always thought the advice to wear rubber gloves when cooking with jalapeno peppers was for wimps. I mean, really — how bad could a pepper seed be? The truth of the matter is I have never made anything requiring a jalapeno in its natural state until tonight.

Lately I am challenging myself to try new things out of healthy cookbooks, rainbow swiss chard, and carmelized red onions with balsamic vinegar, well — you get the drift. Tonight I made smoky shrimp corn soup and spicy chick pea lettuce wraps.

The spice in the lettuce wraps comes from a jalapeno. I sliced it and using the edge of the knife scraped out the seeds. I minced half of the pepper and tasted it. I didn’t even bother to cut up the second half, there was quite enough heat as it was.

After dinner I turned on the dishwasher and noticed my hands were tingly as if they were asleep. I shook them, and waved my hands in the air. But it didn’t help. My hands felt as if they were simmering, hot and spiking pain. I stood there expecting to see my hands burst into flames.

AHA. This is it, I thought. This is the reason you wear gloves.

When I googled how to get rid of pain from jalapeno peppers, there are a lot of suggestions. Baking soda, rubbing alcohol and milk being the most frequently touted  cures.  I tried rubbing alcohol since it was handy. Mine was a mild case and it worked pretty quickly, others aren’t so lucky.

I read about a man who roasted, peeled and de-seeded a 5 pound bag of jalapeno peppers without gloves. He was in excruciating pain for 18 hours; he went to the emergency room and after trying different things, they gave him some really strong pain killers and sent him home to wait it out.

I bet he never did that again.

Cooking Lesson

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I read in MS Living mag that one of her editors loved to feed her family of 3 boys and 1 husband a chicken that was simply sautéed in olive oil and finished with a combination of red wine vinegar, garlic and rosemary.  A photo of both the dish and the attractive family of five clearly anticipating a great dinner sent me to the grocery store.

The butcher asked if I was making curry when I asked to have the chicken, skin and bones intact, chopped into about the same size pieces. I’ve never made curry but I said yes, anyway — as what was the point of carrying on that conversation thread?

Mixing the marinade was the only step unless you want to count mincing the garlic cloves and cutting up the rosemary. The recipe said, “Don’t crowd the chicken, cook in two batches if necessary.” I pretty much ignored that, thinking — the chicken were long passed the time of caring whether they were crowded.

That was a mistake. 

Instead of a clean crisp sear, the chicken steamed. Instead of a rich brown carmelized finish, the chicken turned a pock-marked pale grey. Instead of a uniform doneness, the parts were either half-cooked or overdone.  Adding broth to the pan to begin a glazing sauce caused the chicken to seriously simmer, no doubt still irritated about the crowding.

Then the vinegar, garlic, rosemary marinade joined the party — and really never left. The finished dish was a jumble of bones, skin, tough chicken meat with a chief note of an unbalanced vinaigrette.  I served it over brown rice with asparagus.