I watch a lot of cooking shows. I'll even watch reruns of cooking shows I've seen many times before. Essentially, after this many years of watching people cook, you'd think I would have started to grasp the concept of wearing some sort of protection on your hands when chopping up a pepper with any sort of hotness. YOU WOULD THINK.

Last Friday I was making Mexican Black Bean Dip, which is a fabulous combination of avocados, green onions, garlic, tomatoes, and peppers. One small jalapeno and some anaheim peppers, neither of which are terribly hot. It very briefly occurred to me that maybe I should not chop up peppers with my bare hands, but since my only glove options were my dishwashing gloves, I started chopping away.

Things were going fine with the whole chopping peppers thing and I was trying to be very careful about not touching my eyes, because I knew that would be bad. And then my nose started to itch, and without thinking about it, I scratched. Shortly after this, I felt a sensation I've never felt before, which I would like to describe as flaming hotness. Not an "I burned my finger on the edge of that hot pot" burn but another sort of hotness entirely. And really what could I do about it? I've heard that if you eat something really hot you should drink milk. I was not about to dunk my nose in a glass of milk. Right around the time I thought the medicated aloe I have for sunburns might be a good alternative, the burning started to stop. However, I was still sort of aware of it for a couple days later. Even the tips of my fingers felt a little burned.

And you know, I could have sworn I've cut up jalapenos and anaheim peppers before without any sort of hot consequences. Of course, I also used to be able to stomach airplane landings, and I don't do that so well anymore.

Guess who is going to buy a box of latex gloves for her next pepper chopping endeavor?

ME!