Goodness, Gracious, Great Balls of Fire!

I don't know about you, but I like spicy foods. The problem is, they don't always like me back. Well actually, it's kind of rare that they like me back. Most of the time there are, um, shall we say, consequences to eating any significantly spicy foods. However, that doesn't stop me from pushing the envelope now and then.

I have a friend, (Yep you know who you are. He's reading this right now.) who LOVES the hot stuff. The hotter the better. He loves the hot wing sauce... eats it like he's eating candy. McDonald's has a hot wing sauce for its nuggets. I think he uses a whole pack per nugget. Doesn't even break a sweat.

So a few weeks back, I get a chance to have lunch with my good friend. He is often out of town, so for us to be able to get together to have lunch is always a treat. Anyway, we head to the local Taco Bell knock off, Taco Tierra. I love to get whats called a chicken cheesy and a jumbo cherry Mt. Dew when I go. I also get a side of sour cream and a cup of their medium sauce to dip the cheesy in.

Well on this day, they were a little skimpy with my cup of medium sauce and I ran out. But, no worries, my good friend had not used all of his sauce for his sancho. So I asked him if he was done with it. He said I could have it.... BUT HERE IS WHERE I SHOULD HAVE BEEN LISTENING!! He said I could have it, but to take it easy, it was the hot sauce. I nodded, thanked him and dipped away.

Okay folks, looking back I realize now that I missed several visual and audio cues that would have saved me significant pain and discomfort.

1. When he used the "hot" sauce, he put just a little drizzle on his sancho.
2. If my friend says it's "hot", for us normal people that means its nuclear. To quote Dan Aykroyd in Spies Like Us... "It'll suck the paint off your house and give your family a permanent orange afro."

Now, in addition to these cues that I should have picked up on, there was another crucial piece of information that I was missing.  I eat the MEDIUM sauce with no problem from this place. SO, I'm thinking that HOT, is only one step up from what I'm used to. Not a big deal to handle on my last three bites. What I was Oh so painfully unaware of, was that they in fact have levels of HOT. The last two are so hot they don't even advertise that they have them. You have to specifically request them from the back like some kind of drug deal.

"No, I want the hot stuff in the back."

To put this in perspective, my friend prefers the number 4 sauce, even he doesn't like the number 5 sauce because it obliterates his taste buds. I'm not sure if my friend is aware, but they actually have names for these sauces, not just number designations.

No. 4 = A@# Kicker
No. 5 = Kick Yo A#$

So... back to the story. I have just lathered up my chicken cheesy in what I thought to be "HOT" sauce. As I'm chewing, I start to feel a rather significant heat build up. In my mind, I'm thinking, wow this is really hot stuff. To my misfortune, it did not stop there. I'm pretty sure I started to smell cooking flesh. My eyes began to water and I broke out into a sweat. At this point, I should of ejected the offending food from my mouth. Alas, I did not. My only thought was to get it down the hatch ASAP and put the fire out with my jumbo soda. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm hear to tell ya, that was a bad move. Because this stuff was the gift that keeps giving. From heart burn all the way through, I could track it's progress. I'm here to tell you, I will not need a colonoscopy any time soon because this stuff burnt up an polyps I might have had. At one point I was concerned I might need to get some flame retardant toilet paper.

Needless to say, I did survive my ordeal. I do, however, make sure I pay better attention to my friend when he says something is hot.

How about you... Do you like spicy food?


-Red

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