sun-drying
wards against mildness
garland peppers

Bulgarian carrot peppers — possibly the same peppers seen hanging in the above photo — rank from 100,000 to 325,000 on the Scoville unit scale, right alongside the common habañero — although they probably tend towards the hot side, as one gardener describes on the forum I Dig My Garden:

“It is easily hotter than my habaneros. It was really tasty . . . but that flavor was followed by ten minutes of pain.”

That’s hot. Not as hot as the hottest pepper known to man: at over a million Scoville units of heat, the Bhut Jolokia or”ghost” pepper. That thing is so hot it can steal your ghost, or so people say. Compare to this Huy Fong Sriracha, a.k.a. “rooster sauce”, which weighs in at 1,000 to 2,500 Scoville heat units, according to Wikipedia. It seems worthless by comparison, but it’s known to give food a tasty kick.

I love my spicy foods. In fact, one of the reasons that I’m looking forward to the Clan Ross Summer Surf Adventure is because we will be enjoying Thai food in restaurants on the West Coast; something I’ve missed about living in Detroit is the availability of Thai food — around here, we have none. I love my Thai food, and I like it hot enough to make my nose run.

A couple of weekends ago, Mme. Ross went to a bachelorette party, leaving me at home on a Saturday night to hang out with Little Miss (our daughter) and feed her dinner. Hot dogs and mac & cheese: as easy as it gets – only I’ve gotten into the habit go putting the rooster sauce on my Mac & cheese; kind of like ketchup, I do a generous spiral from the center out and mix it in. The mac turns a pinkish color when I do this, and I like it that way. Sometimes I only mix it in a little so I can get some hot flavor drops in there.

Little Miss sees this and wants some. She pushes her plate forward, points to the Sriracha bottle, says “please”, then points to her plate and says “eet dere” (translation: right there.) I try telling her she can’t have it, that she doesn’t want it — but she insists.

I’ve always sworn that I would never do anything to harm my daughter. But now I take a chunk of hot dog and put a tiny dollop of Sriracha on it from the bottle and watched her lick it off, as I knew she would.

She cried. I wanted to feel bad for her, but that’s when I realized that try as I might, there’s no way I can shield her from everything; sometimes even I’m the bad guy.