which_chick | (no subject) (Reply)

I was making dinner tonight and all grinding up the ginger and cumin seeds and jalapeno peppers in the mortar and pestle arrangement I have. I rather like my mortar and pestle arrangement and I was really getting into the grinding process. Unlike the disastrous wood of the weekend, the curry flavorings were grinding up nicely under my will. The jalapenos were juicy and crispy, having held up better in the fridge than expected over the weekend. I was leaning over the mortar and putting my weight on the pestle for better grinding of the juicy and crispy jalapenos. In the midst of my zeal, a drop of jalapeno juice exploded upward out of the mortar to land squarely in my left eye. Since embarking on extensive journeys in Indian food, I'd wondered, occasionally, what it would be like if jalapeno pepper juice escaped the mortar and pestle set to land in my eye -- this is not the first drop of jalapeno juice that has escaped the confines of the mortar and gone airborne.

Well.

Now I know.

Should this ever happen to you, it is important to maintain sufficient presence of mind during the subsequent Very Unpleasant Moments to avoid reaching up with your jalapeno-covered fingers and rubbing the jalapeno'ed eye with your jalapeno'ed fingers. I didn't. Learn from my experience.

Your best course of action is to shut your eye and let it tear up and burn. Then you can open the eye because you will think that this will be better. It will not be better. It'll burn a lot worse. You may not be able to see out of the eye. Don't panic. Close it again and let it tear up some more. Open it again. Worse. Close. Open. Close. Open. Eventually, the jalapeno will go away and you will be fine, but this process takes A LOT LONGER THAN YOU WILL WANT IT TO TAKE.