If You Can’t Take The Heat, Try Some Milk

Don’t mess with me. I’m packing heat.

Actually, I am packing jalapeno pepper jelly, which I made with my own garden peppers. I made this jelly because I want my whole family to enjoy the hot, hot flavor of jalapenos, forgetting for the moment that most of my family can’t stand the hot, hot flavor of jalapenos.

Can you believe that? Some people don’t understand the beauty of second-degree lip burns. They believe that food was never intended as a test of courage, a trial by fire, or, as Joan of Arc discovered when she put too much hot sauce on her sirloin, a burning at the steak.

No, these people believe that food should be judged on taste, nutrition and ability to sustain human life, if you can imagine such a misguided notion. They have not yet become enlightened, or inflamed, to the idea that food should be judged on its ability to irritate the membranes.

I can understand this mistaken way of thinking, because I used to share it. I once was innocent of the hotter pleasures of life, if you know what I mean, wink-wink, and I think you do. I refer, of course, to Tabasco.

When I was young, I felt that hot sauce and hot peppers were unpleasant for the simple reason that they were, by all standards, unpleasant. I believed at the time, and I can hardly fault my logic, that there was enough pain in the world without eating food that stings. If God wanted us to eat food that stings, I thought, He would have invented mashed bumblebees instead of mashed potatoes and butter. (I was not a particularly bright child.)

But somewhere along the way, I became corrupted. I can still remember the moment it happened. I was in my early 20s. A bunch of us were sitting around in my living room staring at my friend Rex, a dissolute accountant whose bowling-league fashion sense pre-dated the Drew Carey revolution by 25 years. Rex was holding up a can of jalapenos, peering at them through his black-framed glasses, and saying, “Watch this.”

He picked up a whole jalapeno, held it between his fingers as if it were a limp green sardine, then popped it in his mouth. And then he followed it with every jalapeno in the can, barely bothering to chew.

Everyone was disgusted; everyone made gagging noises; everyone predicted he would wind up in the emergency room. I, naturally, thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.

Soon, I began to experiment with heat, first learning the secrets from Rex.

“Drink a little milk first,” he confided. “Coats the membranes.”

Gradually, I learned that there was a wide, wide world of hot food out there to sample. There was Texas chili, Szechwan shrimp, Indian vindaloo and Thai curry. I finally worked myself up to four stars at a Thai restaurant, a rite of passage so significant that perfect strangers came up and slapped me on the back. (I later learned they were attempting the Heimlich maneuver.)

Yet it wasn’t until I began to grow my own chiles that I began to truly appreciate the sheer power of the chile. Once, I was chopping up jalapenos for my own recipe of Texas-style chili when I made the mistake of putting a finger up to my eye. The pain from the chile oil was so excruciating that I compounded the mistake by rubbing my eye, and then I nearly compounded the mistake again by trying to rip the eyeball out of its socket.

Peppers - who wouldn’t love them?

Now I find myself growing four kinds of peppers in my garden every year, including the jalapeno, the cayenne and the notorious habanero, supposedly the hottest pepper in the world and the only one which has been declared a “Superfund” vegetable by the EPA.

Imagine the excitement when I bring these things into the house at harvest time.

“I’m not eating that,” is a typical comment.

“Don’t put it in our actual food,” is another.

Undaunted, I put on my surgical gloves and start to chop them up for my special pepper jelly. Once again, I ponder the mysteries of life:

Why do some people like hot food?

Why do some people hate it?

Why am I lying here in the emergency room, having my eye sockets flushed out?

, DataTimes MEMO: To leave a message on Jim Kershner’s voice-mail, call 459-5493. Or send e-mail to jimk@spokesman.com, or regular mail to Spokesman-Review, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jim Kershner The Spokesman-Review