There’s A Reason Cops (and Campers in Grizzly Country) Carry Pepper Spray

File this one in Sunday cooking tips.

One that might save your life (in where you only wish you could die).

While you are preparing for that great Mexican feast for later today–you do have the cervazas chilling, right?–and you are just about ready to do all your slicing and dicing for that great homemade pico de gallo recipe (that I will link to, in case you lost yours), STOP. STOP. STOP.

HOLD everything until you read this.

Remember your mother telling you that doing certain things with your hands could make you go blind…

(Not sure if this admonition was true for the daughters, but the warning was prevalent among us sons.)

Well here is what she REALLY was talking about.

If you get cavalier with certain hand manipulations you might get a burning sensation much worse than the burning sensation you might suffer through hours AFTER eating all this great spicy food.

Anyone who has minced hot chili peppers and gotten their fingers anywhere near their nose, or even worse their eyes, will attest to a result that will bring on all sorts of entertaining gyrations–at least to those near-by who don’t hesitate appreciating the suffering of others–as long as it is not permanent or doesn’t involve children, old people, or dogs. (cats may be fair game, depending on the audience).

While we were in Baja earlier this year (http://sanddollaradventures.wordpress.com/category/baja/) one of my daughters volunteered to make some fresh pico de gallo. While I was probably peaceably preparing my daily blog post, all of a sudden my daughter was running around like there was a fire (which was not totally ironic as she actually is a fire fighter).

Her first stop was the bathroom sink where she was splashing, snorting, and immersing her nose in as much water as possible with a kind of reverse waterboarding objective in trying to reduce the torture she was going through having apparently put her finger in her nose while preparing the salsa–which, in and of itself, is gross enough as we were going to be eating that mixture a short time later.

Well, as we all know water does little to nothing to quell this discomfort.

What transpired for the next few minutes was her applying various bathroom–and kitchen–liquids, salves, creams, lotions…and food products.

The picture submitted for your entertainment–and the likely justification for revenge to her father for publishing it–shows just one of the items that was attempted: yes, that is a spoonful of yogurt; and, no, it did NOT help.

The internet has great advice how to avoid the problem from occurring, consisting of really clever advice such as:

Don’t touch your eyes or nose while cutting hot peppers.

What DID we do before we had the internet to answer difficult questions with such sage advice?

The other prominent suggestion is to wear gloves, which does help later, but not while doing the pepper prepping.

So, did anything work to quell the pain, which was not at all funny at the time to the sufferer?

After the spreading of numerous items from the bathroom and refrigerator–there went dinner–I finally dug out a small plastic bottle (TSA legal at less than three ounces, of course) of Vaseline Aloe lotion…and it worked.

 

 

And if you peruse the internet for a while you will probably see that one item is listed by a number of people, and that is Aloe Vera.

Just remember, if anything with that pepper oil on it goes into any bodily orifice with sensitive tissue you’ll get that, oh my, burning feeling.

 

 Hmmmm, maybe THAT is why mom told us to not touch that thing!