![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Jul. 27th, 2006 12:24 amHot sauce! Let me tell you about hot sauce! ("Oh God, No!" cry the wise ones, running for the tall timber...)
A bunch of years ago, Diane & I were guests at a Star Trek con in Manchester. On the Saturday night, a bunch of Klingons wanted us (me, in particular, on the strength of Rules of Engagement) to drink Fire Wine with them. We were at that time heading out with the committee and various aides and helpers. trooping off to Mancunian Chinatown for dinner, but we promised the drinky-thing would happen when we got back.
And indeed it did, because the Klingons had been Lurking (as they do.)
Diane got a slug of something which - I tried it - after all these years I still think was a chilled mixture of port, Chianti, balsamic vinegar and some unspecified hot sauce. She choked it down, coughed in an entertaining and amusing way, and got a round of applause when she upturned her empty shot-glass.
I (as I should have expected, because it came from a different bottle) got the same but more so. Port, Chianti, balsamic and what I'll bet was Endorphin Rush. (It definitely wasn't Dave's Insanity, because that stuff has a lingering and unmistakeable oily backtaste.) Whatever. I slammed it down na zalpom (Russian-style, straight down past the tonsils in one shot before the sensible part of the brain can step in with a WTF? No Way! reaction.) And then, because I was feeling my oats a bit, I asked for a refill and did it again.
Cries of "QapLa!" and Brownie points all round. However the cheers came in quietly, because I was discovering that this sort of mixture was TIAG*; I wasn't hearing anything much apart from a deep-fryer sort of sizzling noise, and was fighting back an unseemly desire to dribble. So we went to bed.
(*Tinnitus-in-a-Glass; alternately “This Is A Game”. So was what went on in the Colosseum.)
However.
Come the dawn, or more correctly not-quite-but-pretty-close-to-noon (anyone who's been to a convention with me knows that I Am Not A Morning Person unless there's bacon in almost unlimited quantities) and we were up and about. In fact, we were among the very few who were up and about.
Diane and I were the only people of about 25 who'd been to That Restaurant for That Dinner who hadn't spent the night either on or face-down in their respective toilets. There'd been something dodgy somewhere in the sweet-and-sour. I don't know what, and I don't want to know what. But the capsaicin in the Fire Wine had either killed it (dead, as the ads say), or stunned it for long enough that normal digestive processes had shifted it beyond doing-harm's way.
There's a moral there somewhere, and the moral is that the very topmost shelf in our kitchen cupboard (the one with the biohazard stickers) usually has more than seems a sensible amount of bottles with labels like "Who Dares Burns"; "Fire Retros"; "Afterburner", "Pain is Good #4" and so on. Daft, maybe...but something seems to work.
Oh, and various medical journals (Lancet, New England JoM) have proved that chillis not only don't cause ulcers, but can cure them.
So there.
A bunch of years ago, Diane & I were guests at a Star Trek con in Manchester. On the Saturday night, a bunch of Klingons wanted us (me, in particular, on the strength of Rules of Engagement) to drink Fire Wine with them. We were at that time heading out with the committee and various aides and helpers. trooping off to Mancunian Chinatown for dinner, but we promised the drinky-thing would happen when we got back.
And indeed it did, because the Klingons had been Lurking (as they do.)
Diane got a slug of something which - I tried it - after all these years I still think was a chilled mixture of port, Chianti, balsamic vinegar and some unspecified hot sauce. She choked it down, coughed in an entertaining and amusing way, and got a round of applause when she upturned her empty shot-glass.
I (as I should have expected, because it came from a different bottle) got the same but more so. Port, Chianti, balsamic and what I'll bet was Endorphin Rush. (It definitely wasn't Dave's Insanity, because that stuff has a lingering and unmistakeable oily backtaste.) Whatever. I slammed it down na zalpom (Russian-style, straight down past the tonsils in one shot before the sensible part of the brain can step in with a WTF? No Way! reaction.) And then, because I was feeling my oats a bit, I asked for a refill and did it again.
Cries of "QapLa!" and Brownie points all round. However the cheers came in quietly, because I was discovering that this sort of mixture was TIAG*; I wasn't hearing anything much apart from a deep-fryer sort of sizzling noise, and was fighting back an unseemly desire to dribble. So we went to bed.
(*Tinnitus-in-a-Glass; alternately “This Is A Game”. So was what went on in the Colosseum.)
However.
Come the dawn, or more correctly not-quite-but-pretty-close-to-noon (anyone who's been to a convention with me knows that I Am Not A Morning Person unless there's bacon in almost unlimited quantities) and we were up and about. In fact, we were among the very few who were up and about.
Diane and I were the only people of about 25 who'd been to That Restaurant for That Dinner who hadn't spent the night either on or face-down in their respective toilets. There'd been something dodgy somewhere in the sweet-and-sour. I don't know what, and I don't want to know what. But the capsaicin in the Fire Wine had either killed it (dead, as the ads say), or stunned it for long enough that normal digestive processes had shifted it beyond doing-harm's way.
There's a moral there somewhere, and the moral is that the very topmost shelf in our kitchen cupboard (the one with the biohazard stickers) usually has more than seems a sensible amount of bottles with labels like "Who Dares Burns"; "Fire Retros"; "Afterburner", "Pain is Good #4" and so on. Daft, maybe...but something seems to work.
Oh, and various medical journals (Lancet, New England JoM) have proved that chillis not only don't cause ulcers, but can cure them.
So there.
