For Oz's birthday I figured I or, rather, we could cook up his favorite thing: "Peruvian" potato salad. It's "we" because he handles the potatoes (that's fair: he's of Polish and British Isles descent, potatoes are in his blood). I probably ought to post the recipe, but it's from a cookbook and I don't feel like engaging in copyright violations today. This potato salad, among other things, gets fifteen cloves of garlic and four jalapenos. Of late, I've been throwing the jalapenos in the food processor with the garlic (why press fifteen cloves by hand?), but the results have not been satisfactory. When the jalapenos are in such tiny pieces, all the hot oils volatilize away during cooking (this salad has a cooked cream sauce and is eaten warm) and the salad ends up with no heat, just little green flecks.
Oz has to run into the office for a little while and I start the dinner prep while he's out. In order to get a spicy salad, I decide to cut up the peppers by hand, leaving them in fairly large pieces and keeping the seeds to throw into the sauce as well. When I finish the chopping and deposit the pieces in a dish, I wash the knife, wipe of the cutting board, and wash my hands twice. Then, because one of my contact lenses feels as if it needs a slight adjustment, I stick my finger in my eye. Yow! That was dumb and, in the perfectly karmic nature of capsaicin, the punishment for my dumbness is instantly visited upon me as the micro-drops of pepper oil hiding in the whorls of my fingerprint slide like a pyre across the surface of my eyeball.
Okay, so what do I do now? I have to get that contact out, but I can't do that without sticking my finger in my eye again.
I run upstairs to the bathroom and squirt saline right from the bottle into my eyes. Now my eye feels salty, wet, and on fire. I wash my face with soap, I wash my hands with soap, again twice, as if that might get the capsaicin off my fingers. Well, bathroom water tastes different from kitchen water… Eventually I work up the nerve to remove the contact lens and miraculously do it without putting myself in greater pain, by using common sense and the fingers that held the knife, instead of the fingers that touched the peppers. After I get the contact out, I wash my hands again. Twice. I'm curious if that's got all the oil off, so I stick my thumb in my mouth, where it promptly sets my tongue on fire. For the sake of completeness, I repeat the experiment with the rest of the fingers on that hand. Yup. Still oily. By now the oil has penetrated my finger pads and they're feeling as though I held them directly in a flame.
When Oz gets back from the office, I am dithering by the table and sucking my burning fingers. With one contact lens is out, my world flickers in and out of focus. I pour out my tale of woe.
He asks, "Have you tried milk? You need something to neutralize the oil."
"So this is something you know? Or is this just something you think?"
"Well, when you eat spicy food, you can drink milk to help with the heat," he explains his theory. "You want to try it?"
"Okay, for the sake of science, we might as well find out," I grumble.
He pours milk (1/2 percent butterfat, not quite skim) in a dish and I stick my fingers in. The cold of the milk numbs my fingers for a few minutes, but as soon as the milk warms up to my temperature, the pain comes right back. So, you heard it here first. If your fingers are burned by peppers, milk doesn't help and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. By now I'm laughing about it and I inform Oz of the failure of this remedy.
"We need to neutralize the oil. How about an antacid?" he muses.
"Okay, give me one. Why not?"
He places a Rolaids (peppermint) in my milky fingers. I rub the antacid with my fingertips and dip it in the milk to help it dissolve. Now I have wet, sludgy-feeling, burning fingers. My eye is still burning too, by the way. Antacid doesn't help either.
"How about beer?" Oz says.
I'm not going to waste beer on a topical application experiment. "I'll drink the beer."
Things work out happily in the end. Oz acts as my sous-chef and the salad turns out great. He has a beer too.
Kitchen tips of the day: