The Malevolence of Backyard Nightshades
When I met the woman who would become my wife, I bided my time before inviting her for dinner, wanting to time introduction of my cooking skill into my mating ritual just so. Famously and coincidentally, I failed Math 117 three times in college, not graduating until completing that requirement in an additional summer semester. Deciding to impress her with my exotic talents, she accepted my invitation for dinner and I made a simple green papaya salad, but I absentmindedly quadrupled the number of bird’s eye chiles called for — which quickly resulted in the polite setting down of forks, my special lady friend gamely pulling her hair back off of her neck to cool off and quietly skulling a glass of ice water before I addressed the elephant in the room: I fucked up the salad. Badly. Painfully, memorably, irreversibly so. Marking an abrupt end to the evening’s dinner activities, and the first (but not even remotely last) instance of her eating a neutral, cooling apple for dinner because of my insistence on painfully spicy foods. While in the end I got the girl, this has been a recurring theme in our life — me overdoing it on the spicing accidentally or in a fit of overconfidence at my tolerance thereof, both of us then suffering fiery consequences of mouth, sinus and gastrointestinal tract.
Some short time thereafter, at a favorite restaurant in Oakland’s Temescal district, we discovered shishito peppers, simply pan-fried with oil, salt and pepper, and eaten whole. Since nicknamed Russian Roulette Peppers in our relationship, they’re a risky proposition, but like dangerous sex the chance of it all going wrong constitutes a not inconsiderable portion of their appeal. Since moving to New Mexic0 — a state with a climate perfectly in tune with growing hot peppers — we’ve cultivated a number of varieties: jalapeños, hatch, bird’s eye, serranos, orange bell and yep, shishitos. We revel in the household-sized bounty each year, merrily picking ingredients as they ripen and mature for any number of meals we make one another. From memory, the most garden-heavy of any recipe I’ve mastered required nine different home-grown ingredients, making it so, so deeply satisfying — the fruit of my agrarian labors!
One thing I’ve given up since childhood is hunting: while I have no moral issue whatsoever with harvesting animals for food, I can’t abide killing them myself. But I retain utmost respect for those who can and do, particularly so when they’re willing to share with me. I cherish game meat. I find the taste of venison and elk so much more flavorful and wholesome than beef, even the hand-massaged, grass-fed, coddled stuff. The biggest fraud perpetuated upon the American people, in my opinion, is that of the commercial steakhouse, with $65 t-bones and eleven dollars’ worth of heavy cream and wilted spinach, all for a what amounts to a bland beefy protein sponge. Comparatively, any piece of game meat will taste of an actual, literal terroir. Redolent of sage or sweet from alpine grasses, deer and elk are close to my heart. Hard-won and wholly unique per the processing of the butcher, game meat, I think, appeals to the sheer human in us. Or, me.
So a friend had gifted me a couple pounds of ground elk meat a couple of years ago, from an animal he harvested from the flanks of New Mexico’s Mt. Taylor, which doubles as the traditional spiritual southern boundary of the Navajo, and which I can see directly from my office, distant on the horizon and omnipresent in its proximity. I had an excited internal debate about how to cook this gift— I know a fantastic stir-fry heavy on bird’s eyes, garlic and fish sauce, which when paired with a fresh farm egg and Thai basil is properly unreal — but admit to feeling momentarily usurped when my wife suggested she could make chile rellenos with the meat.
When my senses returned I gladly agreed, and she set about making these glorious stuffed green bell peppers, blue cheese and the elk meat smelling deep and unmistakable and causing me to salivate desirously as she cooked. She also cooked a batch of shishitos from our garden, recreating that recipe from Pizzaiolo, and we sat down with nice wine, me counting my lucky starts three times over for the fortune to get the meat, to have grown so many ingredients ourselves and to have a beautiful woman cook it for me.
Like the satisfying snap of bratwurst casing under duress, shishito peppers have a crunch to them that gives way to a sweetly spicy and tangy taste. With half a dozen of the peppers onboard, I picked another up and nonchalantly bit into it — and was immediately shocked by the pressurized burst of steam and gas that popped into my mouth like carelessly opened champagne. I coughed and sputtered and chewed a couple of times before unwisely choking down what was in my mouth. Early, the sensation was of a rising tide of heat, a spreading of warmth descending my jaw, the fascia of my neck and collarbones, and ascending my cheeks, ears, eyebrows and temples. Then, a zillion nanometer-scale pinches, as if each nerve cell from the tip of my nose to my esophagus was getting forcibly courted by microscopic hermit crabs.
Fully 15 minutes after I’d spontaneously huffed the capsaicin gas, I was still redlining. None of the increasingly desperate counter-measures made the burning subside: two glasses of milk didn’t diminish the sizzle on my papillae, nor did pinches of salt, water or topically applied ice cubes. My lips purpled, the skin puffy, irritated, angry. So I sat panting, my mouth agape for nearly an hour, all while my lady laughed at me and placidly ate her dinner while the beautiful object of my affection — that coveted, rare elk relleno — sat untouched. It cooled and congealing as the starbursts in my vision subsided and retreated, the swelling and hypersensitivity of my tongue persisting for a duration that, had my affliction instead been Viagra-induced amour, would have by the manufacturer’s own warning merited a tentative, embarrassing, emergent call to the urologist.
Reminded in a comical way of Homer Simpson’s bout with the Guatemalan Insanity Pepper, I tried my best to remain stoic and retain perspective — this too shall pass, I told myself. Always stay calm in an emergency, my long-ago Boy Scout training told me. My now-wife sat with a mixture of concern, amusement and schadenfreude, quietly relishing this abrupt role reversal and plainly enjoying watching me squirm. Her doctorly bedside manner now thoroughly out the window (I complain that she has impossibly high standards for patient toughness with me; she insists I harden the fuck up or stop doing stupid shit to necessitate her administering me medical care) the humor of the situation and the mood in the room began to rise in a linear way as the symptoms of chemical burns in my mouth retreated inversely.
Feeling partially defeated, and as though I’d been formally challenged to face up to my manly shortcomings, I looked back at the relleno. Lovingly made from an aesthetically pleasing green bell pepper (the chile itself with a personal, family history — having been sprouted and nurtured in our greenhouse of a living room, then encouraged and watered and fed and allowed to plump perfectly in the high desert sun) and that precious elk meat and delicious Humboldt Fog cheese, it sat benignly on my plate, untouched but for one small bite. After I’d fully regained functional dexterity in my tongue and my color vision had returned, I decided to throw a leg back over the horse and meet my fears head-on.
Now, they say that those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it, and they also say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. Unafraid and with the false confidence of a cannon-fodder infantryman, I put a bite into my mouth and for half a heartbeat savored the metallic, gamey taste of wild elk, the creaminess of the rich cheese, the sweetness of that perfect bell pepper. And then, like a spastic tweaker set loose at the controls of an Independence Day fireworks display, the conflagration in my mouth sparked off anew, tastebuds alarming as klaxons warning of an air raid, hallucinations of rainbow explosions overriding the signals from my optical nerves, my pupils dilating and shrinking in a frantic, fevered, equatorial rhythm, my cheeks and ears and gums and eyelids and uvula swelling and growing ferociously itchy.
Some people never learn. I still haven’t. Since this famous episode in our life together, my wife and I have gone many places, experienced many things, had many adventures. I still haven’t attempted another shishito, but ominously, as I write today, another devil bush grows malevolently in my garden.
It haunts me. It beckons me.
