Ingredients 4

Over the course of this blog, certain things have come up often enough that they had warranted a series. The "Little Kids Are Awesome" series is probably my favorite one of these (it's up to eleven different entries), but there is a lesser known one about food ingredients that has also started to make a presence. Today's fun is one of those stories.

Let's start with adding in a bit more detail about a post from long ago. When the Mild Wife and I went to the food tasting for the Mild Wedding, we had all sorts of fun. However, one detail that I left out was that one of the people there commented that one of the dishes was "really spicy." Since the Mild Wife and I both liked spicy food, we were excited about sampling that dish, and we made a point to give it a shot.

As it turns out, the dish wasn't really spicy at all. I don't mean that she and I just had a higher tolerance for spicy food, I mean that we couldn't detect a hint of spiciness at all. Hell, one of my pet peeves is that restaurants call things "spicy" but they just taste like a burning sensation (that's not food, that's an endurance contest), so I don't like to have competitions on who can handle more burning. In this case, though, there was no actual tell-tale sting or burning sensation. The food was seasoned, sure, but it wasn't at all what the Mild Wife or I recognized as "spicy."

As we were biting into it, we sort of looked at each other and arched our eyebrows. How did this count as "spicy" food? Were we just missing the joke?

That's when the Mild Wife sort of stumbled onto the realization: this person was referring to the pepper in the food. Yup, they thought that the food was overly "spicy" because it had been seasoned with plain old black pepper, the kind that is frequently found in pretty much any home kitchen. I kid you not, they objected to the pepper. We chuckled a little bit about that, but went about our business.

I mention this because I happened to come across something recently that reminded me of this incident. After a little bit of Internet browsing, I happened to find someone's recipe for a shrimp dish. The salient bit, though, was that they added a bunch of chicken bouillon to the dish. If you've never used that particular ingredient, it's commonly used to make soups, or to act as the base for a sauce. It's usually a flavorful thing, in the way that adding a bit of salt or pepper to your dish gives it some flavor.

At this point, you can probably guess where this is going. Yup, the person giving out the recipe sprinkled in a liberal amount of the bouillon because, and I quote, "we like it spicy." I chuckled when I saw this, and I just had to show the Mild Wife. She immediately burst out laughing when she saw this, and the episode from the Mild Wedding's food tasting came to mind shortly thereafter. It was a couple of minutes full of mirth in the Mild Home.

All in all, though, I am highly amused at what passes for "spicy" with some folks. I don't really have a problem with other people eating differently than I do, but that'd be like me calling something sweet because you sprinkled some salt on it. For their sake, I hope none of these folks ever comoe across a jalapeño or rocoto.