Adventures in Cooking

I have my nose in a glass of milk. Actually, I don't anymore as it would be difficult to type whilst holding a glass of milk to my face, but lets pretend for the sake of present-tense storytelling. So, I have a glass of milk pressed to my face, tilted just so, and my nose placed therein.

Why?

Because I decided to cook Indian food tonight. With hot peppers. I learned from Food Network that you can cut down on the heat in your food by scraping out the innards of the hot pepper, and just using the outsides. I used my fingers to scrape out the peppers. No gloves. And I didn't wash my hands.

I tried a little bit of the pepper to make sure it wasn't too hot for say, Luke, to eat. It was. But not too bad, not much worse than hot Mexican food. I cut down on the amount of hot pepper in the recipe.

Also essential to the plot of this story is my drippy allergy-ridden nose. It dripped. I swiped. I sniffed. The burning started. I tried to wipe it off and rubbed it in. Washing didn't help, not even with dish detergent.

So I remembered that I heard somewhere that milk helps take the burn out of hot food.

So here I am with my nose in a glass of milk, tears streaming down my face. Josh is trying not to laugh at me in my pain. He is also annoyed that now he is stuck making dinner. The pain is gone as long as I keep my nose in the milk. I slowly wean myself from the glass, taking my nose out for a few seconds at a time and then plunging gratefully back into the cold milk.

Josh asks if I still want to put hot peppers into the food.