Caveat Cenatoris (or something like that)

When we got our tomatoes, peppers and basil from Worley, we were about to get married. The needed transplanted, but one thing and another they kept not getting translated until Corinna stepped up and did it in a window of opportunity I never had.

 I can't complain that she didn't follow my mapping system: she didn't even know I had one, and she figured putting the tops of the cups with their initial-based labels down as collars on the plants would identify them.

I've been able to figure out what most of the tomatoes are, but the peppers is another story. First of all, the collars, some blew away, and about half the others faded to unreadable almost instantly.

I knew this, though, my Bhut Jolokia had died. Pretty much all the peppers we've been getting out of the garden are mild ones. California Wonder bells, some sort of banana pepper, there are some hot birdpepper type peppers, cayenne or Thai, I'm not sure which.

So after watering, weeding, harvesting some tomatoes, I realized this enormous bush that hadn't produced anything at all had three ripe peppers on it. They looked like some sort of salad pepper, and the plant had been so slow setting fruit, I wondered if it was even a pepper plant.

So as I was having a bedtime snack, I popped one of these guys in right up to the stem and bit it off.

I realized it was a hot pepper right away. Those Thai peppers, sometimes I'll bite into one in the middle of a plate of stir fry and set myself ablaze pretty good. It's not entirely unpleasant, though you generally don't taste much other than fire after it happens.

So I swallowed, and realized this was a mistake. The Bhut had survived, and I had just cavalierly one-bited the hottest pepper on earth.



I drank water, I drank milk. I drank homemade yogurt, nothing helped. I found the keg with the homemade root beer, which is sweet, the antidote to heat. If I held it in the back of my mouth, it helped, but in a few seconds it lost its effectiveness and I swallowed. The pain came back instantly.

So I repeated this process until my distended belly felt like it would rupture if I took any more anything. So I went upstairs to ride it out and go to bed.

And yeah, the day after repercussions are worse. Plus, my throat and the roof of my mouth are still sore. Turns out you might not have taste buds to perceive the heat, but soft tissue can get irritated as hell. This was like stealing a can of military grade pepper spray and using it as a Binaca.