beat the heat

One of the best things about being an oncology nurse in the summer is that's when your patients want to bring you various goodies from their home gardens.  This week my score was a chock-full gallon bag of assorted hot peppers.

I'm not a fan of heat and I don't really understand why people like to have pain in their mouths.  The Hater, however, likes it hot.  I took a suggestion of the nice man who brought these to me to dehydrate them and use them as seasoning.

We've not used our dehydrator in years.  We got it years ago thinking we were going to dehydrate a lot of fruit to be healthy, and then I read about it and figured out that one of the things that makes fruit so healthy is the water content because that helps to fill you up.  So the dehydrator has lived in its box in the back of the cabinet over the fridge since then.

It took me nearly an hour to slice up the peppers (I wore gloves, but even slicing them gave me a runny nose!) and place them on the trays.  Below is what we ended up with after about twenty hours.

The Hater took Baby into the bedroom to play with Zoloft and I brought out the chopper to work on pulverizing the peppers.  It took to the second batch to figure out that there were holes in the top of the chopper shooting clouds of hot pepper seasoning to my lungs.  Halfway through the third batch in the chopper my nose became a faucet and I couldn't stop laughing, which made me cough, which made me laugh, which made me cough some more, which made me pee myself a little bit.  It was a comedy of errors, at which point The Hater yelled to me that he better not have to take me to the ER.  It was never that bad; he's always an alarmist.

I turned on the air purifier and told him to keep Baby in the bedroom.  I finished the last batch and put what ended up being about half a cup of powdered green fire into a container until we can find a more suitable spice holder.

It's times like these I really wish this blog

had a scratch and sniff option.

Later The Hater opened it to smell it and it triggered coughing for him, too.  If he peed himself he didn't admit it to me.  I'm glad I didn't let him do it because it's sure to have set off his asthma.

And now The Hater has green fire to add to whatever he likes.  He's also dreaming up ways that he could trick people into eating it with him.  He's already wished that his brother could visit so he could secretly add some to his burger.  

Heat for my hubby.  Happy Father's Day, Hater. 

(Go Thunder!  Beat the Heat!)