You had me at pain 100%

I don’t worry if China is going to get us or Al-Qaeda.  Hot red pepper is going to get us.  Hot red pepper is a more perilous enemy because we WANT it to HURT us.   

Hot sauce says, I’m going to hurt you real bad.  We say, please do. You had me at pain 100%

Take my salivary glands. They
belong to you.

Nobody steps it down with hot pepper.  They step it up.  I use hot sauce or red pepper flakes with most of my food.  Soup(yes), peanut butter (oh, yes!) meat, rice, potatoes, salad, eggs - anything.  Cherry pie?  That’s next. And then there's the watermelon/jalapeno margarita. It hardly matters what I eat because my mouth is so hot and burning. But still not burning enough, Dr Freud.

The Mantra: ‘Go big hot pepper or go home.’  Forget about gluten or no gluten, America has been Tex-Mexed, Latinized, Indianized and Jamiacanized.  Just as we are inching toward ‘For English press two,’ we have turned over our salivary glands to the devils hot and hotter.

Have we met? Not yet.

In the old days, we had salt, pepper (barely) and maybe a little oregano.  Cinnamon was for apple pie.   Sage was for Thanksgiving.  Olive oil was not meaningful.    The trendy ones used lemon on the chicken when they broiled it.  I marinated the chicken in WishBone Italian dressing.  Woo Hoo. We broiled more than we sautéed.  We hadn’t yet met cilantro or arugula.  None of that matters now. It’s all about the heat index.  If you can still talk and breathe, it’s got to get hotter.

The Naga Jolokia, also known as Ghost pepper is the hottest pepper in the world with a heat index of one million. 

I can totally melt you.

Habanero chili is the hottest commonly used with a heat index of 150,000 to 350,000. Cherry peppers which we used to get pickled in a jar were only 500 on the heat index and we used to think they were hot.

Wilbur Scoville invented a heat index to help us navigate without seriously hurting ourselves.

Jalapeno peppers (5,000). Serrano (10,000 to 25,000), Cayenne (25,000 to 50,000),Tabasco (30,000 to 60,000), Thai, (50,000 to 100,000), 

Rocoto (1000,000 to 250,000) Habanero (150,000 to 350,000), and Big Daddy, the Naga Jolokia, the hottest in the world with a heat index of one million (you can hardly look at it without melting.)