Have you ever ordered a hot spicy meal that was REALLY hot

but you tortured yourself by eating it (or much of it) anyway so you wouldn't look stupid for having ordered it? I did this with shrimp diavolo one time.

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It wasn't even very GOOD, just way too hot.

Mediocre fast-food smothered in cayenne pepper,
but no way was I gonna NOT eat it when I was so desperately trying
to make a good impression on this amazing woman who recommended the restaurant!

I actually REALLY tortured myself once with an AWESOME lamb saag,
so frickin' hot that tears were running down my face
but so DELICIOUS that I just couldn't stop eating it.

That was later, though, after I was cool with letting her see me cry.

I routinely eat food that will cause me to sweat and cry...often it is Indian food. My sister enjoys the fact that I will "injure" myself at least once with wasabi during a sushi meal (probably about 3 times a week).

The hotness is part of the FLAVOR in good Indian cuisine,
not just some peppers tossed on top.

And a little sweat and tears are just part of the experience, NORMALLY...

But that one saag was not just "tears", I was actually CRYING.

SOBBING might be the word...it hurt so bad I couldn't actually talk properly,
and tiny little ants were playing with matches round back of my eyeballs,
but I just COULDN'T STOP EATING IT!

If the chef had suddenly rushed out and told me it was full of rat poison,
I honestly don't know if that would have made me push it away.

:rofl:

No way in hell would I ever do that on purpose!

I usually just ask for "medium heat", and that's about all I can take.

I don't know WHAT he put in that Saag to make it so instantly addictive,
but I certainly have no desire to repeat the experience!

My eyes are actually hurting a little just from spending
these last 20 minutes remembering it. Geniunely scary stuff!

Time for me to go to bed, and dream of garlic nan
and sweet, SOOTHING mango lassis...

Good Night DU!!

He was fond of spicy food, as I always have been. (It's worth noting that he was also a vegetarian, which I am now, but wasn't then)

I, being an immature and cocky 7th grader, asked something along the lines of "what's the spiciest things you've got?"

His parents brought out the chile peppers, and I took a bite out of one - immediately dropping the rest onto the plate, my eyes opened up like a Japanese anime character, and when they brought me something with which to wash it down, I was grateful.

I wonder if smoke came out my ears.

feeling of my scalp breaking into a sweat and my eyes swelling shut. Just for recreational purposes. ;-)

...if you don't order mild, then you can bet you're going to get hot. Very hot!

We tried that in Thailand.

This was long ago, in a galaxy far away, a/k/a my first marriage. We went to Thailand for our honeymoon, to see the Elephant Roundup in Surin and to eat spectacularly. There was this one restaurant in Chiang Mai, just outside the old city walls, with an amazing menu, 14 pages long, so it took us a while to decide what to order. We settled on (among other things) this salad with Thai sausage chopped into it. It was delicious, especially the sausage, but the chefs considered those little tiny green nuclear-powered peppers to be just another green vegetable to chop into the salad, so it hurt to eat it. It was the one dish we couldn't finish. And I recall we came reeling out of that restaurant, drunk on endorphins.

and finishing every meals feels like a major achievement. Belly burn is a thrice daily occurrence. I've been here two years and though my tolerance has improved I still only order "phet nid noi" (a little hot!) and they tone it down for my farang ways, and I still come out with ears steaming and nose streaming. It's a whole other delightful level of fun, and Thais get a huge huge kick out of seeing blondies suffer.

Long live the King, by the way. It's the 60th anniversary of his reign this weekend.

What little I know of King Bhumipol makes me think that he really is the Platonic philosopher-king. I love the story that he told off one military coup, and they backed off and restored the civilian government just on his say-so. And he really does work for the benefit of the people, touring those remote mountain villages to try and convince people they can make a living without growing opium. (Imagine Karzai trying that in Afghanistan. For that matter, imagine Smirky trying that amongst the pot farmers of northern California-- the only thing that would save his sorry ass is that potheads are typically disinclined to violence.)

And he's a Renaissance man in the arts as well. He used to paint, and he used to write music, and I think he used to play the saxophone, and had to give all that up to exercise his responsibilities as king. I once saw a jazz big band called the Vienna Art Ensemble perform a composition of his.

So there's a bunch of reasons I like Thailand, not just the food. Consider yourself envied.

but I couldn't. Ouchy! The good thing is, they expect you to box up a lot of it and take it home. :) :hi:

Tofu stewed in Sichuan peppercorns. After one bite I thought I'd actually eaten a dishwasher crystal by mistake. I could feel it eating into the inside of my cheek. Fortunately everything went numb after that and I was able to get a few more bites down without embarrasing myself.

I asked the waiter to have it fixed the way he would eat it and not the way it would be served to the tourists. Boy, was I sorry!

melted my ear wax.

I also accidentally ate one of those red Chinese peppers in my General Tso's chicken once. The others at the table larfed their asses off as I choked my way through 2 iced teas.

They've something like 20 different levels of hot (you have to sign a waiver to have the hottest one :o ) and I went somewhere in the middle. I thought my tongue would burn up. :D

At our local Indian joint we get a curry that's so hot it's not on the menu as it actually kills taste buds it's sooo hot. It's called pharl

I have never been served a meal that is too hot to eat and I have basically dared some chefs to try. They always seem to think "little white girl doesn't really want hot, we'll just make it medium". GRRR

I love the high-on-chilli feeling, where your eyes are all droopy and your whole body feels a bit floppy. I went backpacking for 4 months and had no 'real' chilli the whole time, just picante and pimiento sauce and the first Thai green curry after that was the best chilli high ever!

I think it stems from my Dad feeding my Tom Yum soup as a child, but I beat him at a chilli challenge the other day.

Even the sever said he never does that. Ouch.

The whole dish was pleasantly hot. But one bite of the chile made me think I was about to die. Sure cleared out my sinuses.

Chipotle sauces in some Mexican dishes have a fine slow burn. And Cajun/Creole cooks know how to make it hot & spicy! But this is stuff I'll eat "on purpose."

I drowned my California roll in it. I thought I was going to have a seizure.

But one of my friends accidentally tried a quarter-sized dollop of a 500,000+ scoville unit hot sauce on a cracker. (for reference purposes, Tabasco is something like 5000 scoville units, I think). I truly thought we were going to have to take him to the hospital.

When in college in 1970 or so, I went with a friend to a Pakistani restaurant in NYC. I ordered the "medium" spiciness level because I liked spicy food and thought I could handle it.

At first bite I nearly blasted into orbit. Choked down as much as possible, with tears running down my cheeks. Two or three pitchers of cold water helped a bit. My friend said nothing but grinned silently over his extra mild order.

It sounded so good that I ordered it, despite knowing better. But I thought I was safe, since I asked for it to be as mild as possible. And though it looked really wonderful, I couldn't eat much of it, because it was still way too hot. I'm not big on food that's just too hot for me to taste it. I won't be making that mistake again, unless I prepare it myself.:-(

I don't remember what I ate once, but at Hunan in Rosslyn VA, I dipped into some kind of endorphin-rush sauce that I felt for literally three hours afterward. Holy SHIT.

at the Indian restaurant in front of clients...

All my clients on this one job were kids (kids to me is anyone still in their 20s). They were all world travelers, multicultural, etc. loved extra spicy Indian and Thai food.

I didn't want them to think the "old chick" (40's) couldn't hang. Ended up providing more amusement with my red face and watery eyes than I would have it I had simply said "could you order me something milder?"