Comin’ in HOT

An adventure with a Santa sack of habaneros

My wife likes spicy food. Not in a competitive way. It’s more like she appreciates the flavor. Before I met her, I was known to order spicy food with the request they make it “white girl spicy.” Meaning, enough spice to make it special but not so much that I would want to drink water through a firehose after eating it. Please, and thank you.

Nowadays, I have grown to appreciate and embrace some spice. The nuances of a particular pepper or spice are interesting. It could be smoky, sweet, hotter than hell or just plain flavorful. This change in palate has been an interesting culinary adventure! For instance, one Thanksgiving we went to Santa Fe and we had some form of chile with every course of every meal. Sometimes it was red. Sometimes green. Sometimes “Christmas.” Every bite was amazing.

Where we live in the Midwest, we have an awesome farmer’s market every Saturday morning during the warmer months. There are beautiful offerings from flowers to fruits and veggies, and mini donuts. So many times when we visited the market, we would see people walking with a garbage bag — a big plastic garbage bag — of habanero peppers. We always mused about what they would do with all that! Seriously. What fresh hell do you do with that many habaneros?

Last summer we got a bee in our bonnets and decided to get a quarter bushel of habaneros. Why not? It wasn’t that many! We could cook them down and maybe make a salsa or something.

Let me tell you… they were delicious. My wife prepped them — roasted and cooked them down and we ate them pretty much straight out of the pot. They were smoky and delicious and had the perfect amount of heat. In Mac n cheese? You betcha. On eggs? Dee-lici-ous.

This gave us a certain kind of confidence. It maybe made us a little too confident.

The next week at the farmer’s market, we decided to go all-in. This time, we were the ones with the Santa sack. Yep. We got the full bushel of habaneros.

Now what?

Bless my sweet wife. She processed all the peppers herself. I did offer some assistance and her response was, “I wouldn’t if I were you.”

She donned protective rubber gloves and came up for air more than once. We ended up with two Dutch ovens filled nearly to the rim with roasted habaneros, and a rubber glove fail that resulted in me googling old timey remedies for trying to get the pepper oil pain out of skin. Spoiler alert: time is the only thing that works.

These peppers were very different. They were hotter than hell. What were we going to do with them?

Good thing my wife is crafty. She procured two jars of raspberry jelly and mixed them in half the peppers. The other half, she added to some tomatoes and made a salsa. She canned them and we’ve shared them with anyone brave enough to try.

I have great appreciation for those that wander a farmer’s market with multiple garbage bags of habaneros. What it takes to create magic with them is nothing short of a labor of love.

Embracing this “heated” venture in my own palate has also been fun. We joke that we keep any illness at bay by burning it from the inside out. We encourage each other not to talk about what we’re feeling as we ingest the peppers but rather, muscle through it — wiping our nose and tears along the way. (OK, it might be just me that does that).