and things went downhill from there

I was left to my own devices for dinner tonight, but since I had a fairly late lunch of leftover beef stew, I was not exceptionally hungry. I tend to be more ambitious about cooking when I am hungry, so I spent some time out in the kitchen considering and rejecting ideas until I decided to have bacon and eggs. That seemed like a fairly quick, unchallenging dinner.

As soon as I got the bacon out of the fridge and grabbed the knife to pare off a couple of slices, I was struck by another idea and took off at a ninety-degree tangent. I sliced off a ½ inch slab of bacon and then cut that down into cubes I tossed that into a mid-sized stainless steel pot to render and roughly chopped an onion while it did its thing. My plan was to dump in a can of baked beans and supplement it with a bit of molasses, Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco.

Then my brain went completely off the rails.

I mean - why use Tabasco when I have some perfectly good Carolina Reapers in the freeze? When I harvested some of them from the garden this year, I prepared them by mincing them really fine, rolling them up into a long tube and putting them in the freezer. The idea was that when I wanted to give something a little kick, I could pull out the pepper stick, cut a bit off the end and stir it into whatever I was making. I unwrapped the frozen stick of pain, scraped a gram or two off the end and put it back for the next time I went insane.

My first clue that I'd made a potential error in judgement was when I dumped the onions and minced pepper in with the bacon. I stood back from the pot, stirring it from as far away as I could reach, coughing on the fumes coming out of it and wondering what chain of decisions led me to that point. But I pressed on. I cooked the onions down until they were slightly soft and then dumped in a can of beans. That reduced the fume output. A bit. Not entirely. I added a dollop of molasses and a good splash of Worcestershire sauce and suffered over the evil concoction until it was heated through.

I glopped half of it into a bowl and then stirred in a couple teaspoons of sour cream in an effort to tame it a bit.

It had bite, but it was far from inedible. In fact, I daresay it was delicious. I'll probably eat the other half of it for lunch tomorrow.

Two lessons I learned from cooking with these minced Reapers; next time wear a mask when cooking with them, and wear a glove when handling them.

It is a little on the warm side in our computer room this evening.

Though not always foreseen, there are always consequences to our actions.  Yesterday after I picked up atara from work I left my car out on the street because our tentative plans were to head out and meet friends for dinner.  Even though that fell through, I forgot about the car and it sat out on the street for the rest of the afternoon.

As atara mentioned in her journal, it was very warm here yesterday (in the 90s F).  Since this was done without aforethought or planning, we didn't have the necessary ingredients available to determine if a baby left in the car would have come out medium-rare or well-done.  What did happen, though, is that the hula dog on my dashboard melted.  Apparently she was held together with hot glue, and the temperature in the car got hot enough to separate her at the waist.

I now have the nether-parts of a sandal-wearing dog stuck to my dash.  It's actually creepy enough to warrant a picture (which I will take and post later).