I picked up a bottle of Melinda's Naga Jolokia Hot Sauce at World Market.  The Naga Jolokia pepper is also known as the "ghost pepper" and was considered the hottest pepper in the world back in 2007, but has been superseded several times since then by peppers with increasingly scary names.  I think the current king of the peppery mouth-burning hill is the Dakota Strangler and it's wanted in seven states.

Aside from eating some not-very-spicy fast food burger once that claimed to have "ghost pepper mayo" on it, this was my first exposure to a product made of this pepper.


I almost don't like this sauce, but then it redeems itself with really good, strong heat.  The flavor itself is very sharp and vinegary, leaning a little too close to the dreaded Tabasco Zone for my tastes.  But the high level of heat this sauce brings makes up for it by allowing you to add just a little bit.

My bottle is almost empty and I honestly got through it that fast by using a liberal dash of another tasty sauce I like, and then topping it off with a small dash of this sauce for extra heat.

The bad:  The flavor's a little too sharp for my tastes.

The good:  High heat means you don't have too add too much of that flavor to make something good and spicy.

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Here's a sauce with more emphasis on flavor than heat.

For my wife and I, El Pato Jalapeño Hot Sauce (or simply "Pato Sauce" as we call it around the house) sits alongside Huy Fong Sriracha as our favorite day-to-day hot sauce.  We can usually get it at Stater Bros. (a Southern California grocery chain) for $1 flat, so we can always afford to have it on hand.

It has a zesty, bright, fresh flavor that really honors the jalapeños, combined with a mild, pleasant heat.  I think of it as a "taco sauce-style" sauce, so of course we slather it liberally on those whenever we make them.  But it's also really great on eggs.  And, as always, I'm a savage, so it'll go in soups or on pasta or mac and cheese, etc.

My wife is not as much of a hot, spicy junkie as I am, but she has no hesitation reaching for this sauce.

Recommended.

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Lest you think I only ever give hot sauces good reviews, here's one I do not particularly enjoy.

El Yucateco Black Label Reserve (or Black Label Reverse, as their website currently says) is what I think of as a gimmick sauce.  The company describes it as a "dark, smoky habañero sauce" which is absolutely accurate.  Upon opening it, you get blasted in the face with the burnt, smoky smell.  And the flavor follows right along.
Industrial byproduct or hot sauce?
After our usual finger-swish test, my wife declared, "This tastes and smells like a tire fire."

It's really too much.  There are just not many foods I not only want to make spicy, but also want to add "I accidentally burned this" flavoring to.  The sole context I've found in which is doesn't immediately make my food seem inedible is dribbling a little bit onto some steak.  The excessively smoky flavor at least evoked meat cooked over a fire.  But even then, I felt like I was unfairly fucking with the flavor of some really nice tri-tip.  The heat was perfectly respectable and the smokiness was almost convincing when paired with the beef, but I still couldn't bring myself to use more than a few drops on one little corner of my food before resuming enjoying the rest with some Kutbil-Ik instead.

So unless you really, really want to impress your friends with a weird jet-black sauce that smells like the company just figured out a sexy-sounding way to get rid of their burnt habañeros, I say give this one a pass.

The good:  Same low price as other El Yucateco sauces locally, habañero heat is as promised.

The bad:  Horrible flavor that comes after all other flavors with a blowtorch and burns off their heads in front of their families.
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This is the story of what was perhaps my life's biggest hot and spicy epiphany.  My religious experience.  My Joseph Campbellian traversal of the threshold.

Back in the halcyon days of the late '90s, I worked at a mainframe computer facility in downtown Carson City, Nevada.  During my brief tenure on the day shift, I'd get an hour off for lunch and would have to figure out where to grab food from the sparse selection of eateries within walking distance.  Eventually I figured out that there was an actual Thai place that was just outside of the appropriate walking range.  I think I was actually late getting back to work every single time I went to eat there, but it seemed worth it to go somewhere that wasn't a so-so sandwich place or a greasy Chinese food restaurant that also served sushi, because...Asia!


I knew I was a fan of spicy food at the time, but I was still somewhat timid and tentative about it.  So the first time I tried this Thai place, I asked for three stars on the spicy scale.  I figured I'd test the middle of their spicy road to see if it was spicy enough for me, figuring I could move up the scale next time if the mood took me.  The food was tasty, but three stars turned out not to be all that spicy to me and I found I was craving that more than I'd thought.  So on the next visit, I asked for the full five stars.  Food still not bad.  Food still not very spicy.  I think I was actually a little surprised at my disappointment, since I'd been so cautious to begin with.

I digress on purpose:
Growing up, I was rather sheltered from scary things on TV and in movies.  This led me to imagine that scary movies and shows must just be the most hideously terrifying things ever, ever, ever.  I built this up in my mind to the point that I was absolutely terrified of the mere concepts of horror as expressed in the commercials for scary movies and shows.  Because of this, I avoided the hell out of scary movies, often even changing the channel when commercials for them would come on.  So it wasn't until I was in my early teens that I actually watched my first horror movie.  I was hanging out with a friend who had access to a video rental membership and a parental note that said he could rent R-rated movies.  Since it was "his" membership, he got to pick out the movies with little input from me.  His selections were Club Paradise (which I accurately predicted would be terrible) and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.  I was really not happy about the prospect of watching a horror movie in some weird basement with no one but my friend and myself in the house.  But my friend insisted and I didn't want to seem like a big baby, so I went along with it.  To none of my surprise, Club Paradise was a turd.  And very much to my surprise, I ended up enjoying Dream Warriors.  It was funny, gross, clever, creative and tense.  But it wasn't actually all that scary!  What the fuck had I been on about?  What was the big fucking deal?  I felt dumb.  I felt embarrassed.  I made it my mission to find horror movies that were actually scary.  I've happily found quite a few over the years.  And to this day, I still enjoy watching so-so horror movies in pursuit of finding the rare ones that are actually scary.  But I tell this story to illustrate something about me.  The disappointment after I've built something up in my head sometimes spurs me to more vigorously pursue that which I'd feared.

So it was, on a much smaller scale, with the unimpressive five-star spicy level.  I realized that I'd been craving some spicy fucking Thai food, but had hemmed and hawed at first, wimpily wasting time with three stars when five stars couldn't even do the job.  I decided I was going to get some spicy fucking Thai food!
On the next visit, the server asked me, "How spicy, one to five stars?" 

I replied, "Ten."

"Ten?  It's one to five."

"Ten stars," I insisted, "very spicy."

"Ten stars?"

"Yes."

With a shrug, she wrote it down and put in my order.

And it was delicious.  Really prominent heat, but not enough to destroy my face or hamper my ability to go back to work and be among other humans for the rest of the day.  I made it a habit to ask for "ten stars, very spicy" the next few times I went.  I thought I'd established a rapport.

Until on one such occasion, my ten-star request was noted as usual, but the food I ended up getting was not spicy at all.  And I don't mean that I was so inured to spicy foods that the considerably spicy food in front of me that'd torture and inflame the mouths of mere mortals had no effect on my superior palate.  I mean someone in the kitchen forgot to put in any hot peppers at all.  Nothing.  The food was still flavorful and otherwise properly prepared, but there was just no hint of spicy heat.  None.  It was literally as though I'd asked for zero stars.  I needed to eat and was probably already going to be late getting back to work, so I skipped complaining about it, ate my food and went on my way.  No biggie.  Shit happens...

But the next time I was there, I decided to mention it.  Because I was craving my spicy Thai food fix and definitely didn't want a repeat of my previous zero-star experience.

"How many stars, one to five?"

"Ten...but...sorry...last time I asked for ten stars...and the food I got wasn't spicy at all.  I think someone just forgot to add the spicy ingredients.  Can you make sure it's really ten stars this time?"

"Sure, sure.  Ten stars."

The server walked to the kitchen to put in my order.  As she passed me going back the other direction, she casually tried to reassure me.

"I told the chef that last time you got ten stars and said it wasn't spicy enough."

"Oh...that's not really what I said."

A terrible feeling came over me.  She'd turned my innocuous complaint about a minor kitchen misstep into something that sounded very much like a challenge.  I waited anxiously to see whether her minor rephrasing of my request would yield horrific consequences.  I was entirely justified in feeling anxious.

When my plate of pad kee mao arrived, it was just red, red, red.  Pad kee mao is not normally red.  It's a dish also known as "drunken noodles" and it normally consists of broad noodles tinted brown with soy and fish sauces, swimming on the plate with basil and hot peppers and veggies and chicken.  Pad kee mao does not normally look like it's been drenched in a marinara sauce made of pain and revenge.

Not Pictured: My quivering, fearful soul.
I believe I exclaimed "Oh, wow!' out loud.

I'd accidentally insulted the chef's ability to properly spice a dish and he'd repaid me with murder.  I truly believe that chef was making an attempt on my life.  This was supposed to be the day I died and stopped bothering them with stupid requests about weird spicy levels that weren't on the menu.  The chef wanted to laugh to himself from his hot stainless steel lair while the coroner wheeled my fat body out of his place forever on a gurney.

I hesitated, staring at the plate smothered in crimson.

I ate it.

I ate the whole thing.

Through searing pain, I heaved raspy breaths around mouthfuls of the spiciest food I'd ever put anywhere near my face.  I started sweating so much, the server brought me extra napkins without me asking for them.  I couldn't see it, but I could feel that my face and neck were as red as the not-marinara on my plate.  My nose started running and wouldn't stop.  My ears started ringing.  I'd like to imagine that other diners started hurriedly paying their checks and leaving to escape the disgusting spectacle, but I was far too focused on the task in front of me to notice or care.

In between frequent sips of sweet Thai iced tea, I ate every damn last scrap of food off of that plate.  And it hurt.  And it was glorious!  It was transcendent!  I passed through a spicy, vengeful, noodly birth canal to emerge a screaming newborn babe.

I was a red-faced, sweaty, panting mess.  And I loved every painful second of it.  I stumbled back to work high out of my mind on hot, spicy endorphins.

The chef didn't succeed in killing me.  He only succeeded in strengthening my resolve.  On subsequent visits, I would remind the server about the REALLY hot food I'd had there and ask for them to do it again, vigorously gesticulating upward toward the ceiling "Twenty stars!  Very, very spicy!  All of it!"  And the food was never quite as hot as on the day the chef tried to end my life with capsaicin.  But I think I'd passed some sort of test that day.  The chef always used a reasonably excessive amount of hot peppers after that and I was truly never disappointed eating there again.

And it was good.
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Due to the taxing rigors of modern life, I often find myself flat broke.  But despite my empty wallet, I still crave delicious, delicious heat.  Some of the best, most delicious hot sauces have price tags that are not always justifiable when it comes to making a choice between doing laundry that week or feeling my mouth burn after I eat some mac and cheese.  So I'm always on the lookout for hot sauces that combine good flavor and decent heat for not much money.

I picked up a bottle of Mexico Lindo Salsa Habañero Roja at a local El Super* for just over a dollar.  It comes in a little plastic squeeze bottle and claims high heat.

 And it turns out it has a very good heat-to-cost ratio.  For a dollar, it really delivers on the heat. 

Its flavor is definitely heavy on the vinegar tang, but not in a musty barrel-aged Tabasco way.  It basically tastes like the standard green hot sauce flavor that you'd squirt on a taco, but with a really respectable habañero heat level.  Sort of like a much hotter version of El Pato's Jalapeño hot sauce, but maybe not quite as tasty.  Similar, though.

And use it on tacos I have.  I've also used it happily in soups, on eggs, on pizza, on pastas and in burritos.  Basically anywhere you like a green taco sauce-style sauce, but want some to turn up the excellent spicy heat.

My bottle of this sauce is almost completely empty.  Will buy again.  A definite no-brainer for the price.

*El Super is a chain of grocery stores in the Southwestern U.S. for those in other parts of the country.
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Tabasco Pepper Sauce is among the most popular hot sauces in the United States.  It's even ranked pretty highly among sales of condiments in general.  And I've really never liked it.

I'd even go so far as to say I hate Tabasco sauce.

It turns up everywhere in this country.  And mainly because of this ubiquity, I confess I've even used it recently when I felt I really needed to add some kick to something and there was nothing else available.  I'm not saying it's fucking poison.  I recognize that it's technically food.  But I don't like it.

It's fucking everywhere...


In fact, in trying several similar sauces, I've figured out that I don't really like Louisiana style hot sauce in general.  Another popular brand in the same style is Crystal Hot Sauce, which I enjoy maybe just a little bit more than Tabasco, but not enough to move it to the actual "like" column.  And while I've really enjoyed every other product I've tried from Pain is Good, their Batch #218 Louisiana Style Hot Sauce is the only product of theirs that I never finished and ended up discarding after it sat in a cupboard for several years.

There's just something about the fermented, vinegary flavor that I find way too overbearing.  I don't feel like it's enhancing the flavor of anything I'm adding it to, but overpowering and souring it instead.  I think it's the oak-barrel-aged thing.  Most hot sauces have some vinegar.  Some that I really like even have a lot.  But Tabasco and its Louisiana style brethren just taste too "vinegary" to me.  Too acrid.  Gross.

Tabasco tastes like someone kept some budget hot sauce in a plastic bag wrapped around their foot inside a big, warm boot and then walked around on it all year before squeezing that bag's contents out into a little glass bottle, slipping it onto the table next to me and then trying to suppress their giggling while watching face I make while eating it.

And the sauce's relatively mild heat level doesn't help the situation at all.  In order to add enough of it to bring my food up to the heat level I'm typically seeking, I have to pretty much drench it in Tabasco.  At that point, I'm tasting almost nothing but funky old sour peppers.  Veto, Darwin!

Similarly, I'm not a huge fan of Frank's Red Hot or buffalo sauce in general for the same reasons.  I'll eat some hot wings if you put them in front of me, but if there are other sauce options on the menu (e.g.: spicy teriyaki or mango habañero), I'm far more likely to push for ordering those.

Another vague exception for me is a good spicy bloody Mary, which are often made with a few dashes of Tabasco.  To me the blend of flavors in the mix and the presence of copious amounts of alcohol help to mask the spicy old crotch aroma of the Tabasco, making it tolerable again.

I would even credit Tabasco and Crystal hot sauces with setting me back quite a bit on my youthful journey toward spicy Nirvana.  Back when I knew I wanted to try spicy things, but didn't really know where to turn, I bought Tabasco sauce because it was the big popular sauce everyone seemed to like.  And, yeah, it was a bit spicy, but it just fucked the hell out of the flavor of anything I put it on.  I was definitely disappointed.  So I tried Crystal hot sauce next because it was the next popular hot sauce over on the grocery store shelf, but with much the same result.  I decided then that I must not like hot sauces in general.  I ended up playing with sprinkling red pepper flakes and straight ground cayenne pepper on my food for the next few years because I knew I wanted the heat, but not the shitty vinegar-ass flavor that I was led to assume all hot sauces had.

Knowing all the really fabulous hot sauces that are out there now, I'm honestly retroactively angry at Tabasco sauce for convincing teenage me that he didn't like hot sauce.

Fuck you, Tabasco.

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I haven't always loved hot, spicy foods.  Hell, I haven't always had access to them.  I feel like I can confidently trace the origins of my current love of spicy foods back to weekly childhood meals with my dad in San Francisco.

My parents angrily divorced when I was a mere infant and my mother apparently lost the coin toss, so I lived with her full-time, staying at my father's apartment only one night a week.  So most food that entered my face was orchestrated by my mom and my dad was only responsible for feeding me two meals a week, at most.

My mother favored copious portions of rich, fatty foods, but generally seasoned with not much more than salt.  Usually just salt.  Salty, salty salt.  But as "well-seasoned" and "flavorful" and "salty" as her food would be, complex flavors were almost completely absent.  She'd occasionally use some sparse pinches of basic dried herbs if a recipe absolutely called for them.  And aside from some cinnamon or nutmeg toward the holidays, spices were just not a thing we had or used.  In fact, while we had a dusty, battered tin of ground black pepper in the house, I don't think she ever really used it because it was "too hot".  And pepper flakes?  Cayenne pepper?  Hot sauce?  Jalapeños?  They didn't exist in my world, except as something cartoon characters occasionally used to hurt each other.  I grew up deep in the Land of the Bland.

A typical dinner with her would be pork chops or greasy skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs, mashed potatoes from a boxed mix, and a side of some sort of frozen vegetable cooked until it was totally mushy.  Oddly, she hated canned vegetables and looked down her nose at them, but her preferred method of cooking frozen vegetables rendered an end product that was just as mushy.

Her occasional forays into "exotic" dishes were marked by comedic blandness.  My father used to tease her about her "mock chili" and "mock curry" because her versions of those dishes contained the bare minimum of seasoning, if any at all.  Her version of curry had just enough yellow curry powder to color it, but absolutely no more.  And her version of chili had absolutely no seasoning at all, save for a dash of soy sauce on the ground beef and whatever salt and flavor came along with the liquid in the canned beans and tomatoes.  And she'd serve that over rice that had been boiled in a full pot of water and then drained in a colander like it was pasta, so it came out waterlogged and bland to the point of actually sucking some of the flavor out of the "chili".  I didn't learn how you were actually supposed to cook rice until I was in my mid-twenties and living away from home.  

My father's default food habits embraced a whole different part of the bland spectrum.  His relationship with food has always been very different than mine or my mother's, which at first made my weekly visits with him really uncomfortable and...boring.

When it came time to sort out the custody arrangement, some sort of Martian robot logic led my parents to decide that my weekly visitation with my dad should occur on Wednesday nights.  Not on the weekend like normal human parents would arrange, but right in the middle of the school week.  He’d pick me up from school and we’d walk to his neighborhood, which was conveniently located right down the hill in the Duboce Triangle.  I’d have just enough time with him to have dinner, do some homework, be quiet while he did some work, not watch some TV and then go to bed for school the next day.  Some children of divorce get visits with Fun Dad, the Overcompensator!  Not me, though.  I got weird, Drab Dad, whose superpower was being largely unwilling to adjust his routine to account for the presence of another human.  "Oh, boy!" I would definitely not think every Wednesday morning as I got ready for school.  And early on, the miserably drab food he tried to foist on me was a key part of how boring, boring, horrible, bland, boring, bad, boring, bland, bad and boring these visits were.

 Thankfully, our weekly dinners evolved over time, slowly changing from abjectly shitty to decently palatable and eventually to quite delicious.  One of the key improvements was a shift to eating out rather than relying on the awful food he ate on his own the rest of the week.  Early stays at his apartment were marked by dinners of plain steamed vegetables and brown rice.  No salt, no sauce, no meat, no flavor, no joy.  Steamed fucking vegetables and brown fucking rice.  Breakfasts consisted of grainy bread with unsalted butter and an apple on the side.  Being a chubby American boy with a mother who tended to eat emotionally, I was vastly unimpressed.  It just didn't occur to him at first to alter his usual weird Buddhist prison diet when a small child came around. 

Similarly distasteful to child-me, when he discovered Healthy Choice meals in the frozen section and they became a staple at his place during the rest of the week, they became what I had to eat when I came over.  They were low-fat, low-calorie, were slightly more complex and varied and yet even lower effort than his signature hippie steamers.  I've eaten Healthy Choice frozen meals more recently as a quick, cheap option for lunch on days when I couldn't leave work, and I have to tell you their flavor and texture have improved greatly over the years.  They almost taste like food you can eat, now.  But my dad was an early adopter, so these were the first-gen Healthy Choices, back when you could really taste the modified food starch that made up the bulk of the "sauces" and the "everything else".  And mind you, this was in the days before most people had microwaves, so we were putting those tiny, imitation meals into a gas oven and waiting a full forty-five minutes for the distinct lack of pleasure of eating them.  That's a long time to sit and weigh the consequences of the choice you've made between sweet and sour chicken that tastes like cardboard and Dijon chicken that tastes like cardboard, especially for a child.

I don’t remember if I complained about the food or whether he showed an uncharacteristic level of perception about another human's feelings, but eventually he started taking me to various local eateries on the way home from school instead of continuing to torture me at home.  Getting to go out to eat once a week definitely softened the blow of being without my toys and my cable TV for a night.  I dare say I even started to look forward to Wednesdays, because I rarely got to go out to eat with my mother, so it felt like a treat.  It also helped that there were some pretty good places for casual dining within walking distance of my dad's place.

For a while, we went to a vegetarian place which was tastier than it sounded and whose name I remember, but will not attempt to spell.  I just looked it up and it’s no longer there, anyway.  Even better, for a long stretch, we went to Cybelle’s Pizza rather religiously (it's still there, now called The Slice Pizza, but with the same old phone number and everything).  Their pizza-by-the-slice was delicious and bigger than my head.  On a wildly unrelated tangent, I once watched one of the employees there stirring a huge bucket of sauce with his whole bare arm.  It was as impressive to me at the time as it is distasteful to the me that knows about proper food handling now.  

"When is this wordy motherfucker going to finally talk about spicy food?" you mutter to yourself as you consider switching tabs to the porn that's been loading in the background.  It's in this next part.  Calm down.  The porn will be there...

It was at a little burrito place on Church street between 14th and Duboce where I first remember eating food that was way too spicy for me and yet absolutely loving it.  It was located where Taqueria El Castillito is now, but I think I remember the exterior being painted white instead of yellow and I think it might have been named something different, but I can't for the life of me remember what that name might have been.  What I do remember is ordering a chicken super burrito that was not specifically advertised as being spicy, but that ended up burning my little virgin mouth with such fury and vigor that I had to take multiple breaks to breathe heavily and make hooting, hollering noises and drink too much soda too quickly before diving back in for more.  It wasn't loaded with jalapeños.  It wasn't filled with extra spicy salsa.  My little untrained mouth was just such a stranger to spicy food that the rust-colored sauce in which the shredded chicken was stewed was like a glowing spicy magma to me.  It was a revelation!
The Burrito of Destiny - Try the Salsa of Fate!
I'd had various versions of burritos before.  I thought they were tasty.  But I'd still somehow been sheltered from burritos that contained any really spicy elements.  When I bit into that fateful burrito, I was only vaguely aware that spices existed.  I'd only ever had glancing contact with them.  And if I'd ever had spicy chiles pass my lips, it had been in such small quantities that I'd never really appreciated their true fury and glory.   That was the moment I truly learned that food could be hot, spicy and really tasty all at once.  Nothing I'd eaten before had prepared me for the fiery, burning onslaught of deliciousness that flooded my mouth as I chewed that ballistic missile of chicken, rice, beans, cheese and sour cream, wrapped in a stretchy, gooey steamed tortilla.

I digress on purpose:
Did you know that San Francisco is know for its own style of burrito?  Dubbed the "Mission burrito" or sometimes the "Mission-style burrito" or "San Francisco burrito", the style became popular in the Mission District in the 1960s and is pretty much just the way burritos are made everywhere in San Francisco now.  They're characterized by their large size, their everything-on-it approach, and by their steamed tortilla.  Steaming the tortilla renders it stretchier and helps keep it from tearing as it holds the overabundance of delicious ingredients it's tasked with containing.  But I find the steamed tortilla also adds a lot to the party from a texture standpoint.  Dry, hard tortillas just aren't that fun to chew on, whereas a good stretchy, gluey steamed tortilla sort of melds with the cheese and other moist ingredients to give you an experience akin to eating a filled glutinous rice ball popular in various parts of Asia.  There's this little zone where the savory meat and sauce blend a bit with the sticky outer shell and become a new thing in between.  I didn't know that my home town had its own style of burrito until I left and couldn't find it anymore.  And since I first moved away to Nevada, I assumed that what I was looking for but not finding was a California thing.  Only years later did I learn that what I was craving was really mostly relegated to the Bay Area, much to my chagrin.  I'm currently living in Southern California and I'm surrounded by really good Mexican food.  But the thing I just can't get here is a really good Mission burrito and I miss it.  I miss it so much.  Some places around here will throw in some of the extra bells and whistles, sure, but nobody in this area steams the tortillas.  Nobody.

 Anyhoo...

 For the longest time after my youthful initiation to a mouth full of burning satisfaction, burritos were my go-to conveyance for spicy flavors.  I just didn't have the context to know what else to seek out.  In high school, my friends and I would frequently walk over to Gordo's on 9th Avenue (still there, still running), which was about eight blocks from school, and therefore a little too far to walk there, eat a burrito and walk back in time to not be late for class.  Eventually, when the principal would chide us for walking in late as a group, we'd just reply "Gordo's" in explanation as we passed him.  At Gordo's, I'd ask for the hottest salsa option on my burrito and then have them add jalapeños as well.  The chile verde was delicious, but I became a loyal fan of their carnitas.  They'd slap a hunk of it down on the counter and chop it to hell with a big cleaver right in front of you.  Because it was roasted, then fried, you'd get chunks from the inside that were moist and juicy and chunks from the outside that were dry, dark and crisp.  And eating it swimming in sour cream, gooey cheese, beans, rice, pico de gallo, spicy, spicy salsa and tart, hot pickled jalapeños was just wonderful.

Pickled Jalapeños actually became something of a gateway for me to making other foods spicy.  There was a little pizza and sandwich place that was cheaper and much closer to my high school, so we'd often stop in there and grab a slice or a sub when we didn't have giant burrito money.  One of the pizza toppings they offered was jalapeños, so I started adding those to pizza slices.  And then I figured out that I could get jalapeños on my sandwiches as well.  Heck, I could even grab a jar of pickled jalapeños at the store when shopping and start putting those on stuff at home, too.  Amazingly, I never had indigestion in high school.

I was a total hot food novice.  I was a spicy n00b, figuring things out pretty much on my own.  The road was slow and I was timid, but if it weren't for that spicy burrito, which I'm 100% sure I would not find all that spicy today, I may not have developed the deep love of hot and spicy foods I enjoy today.

 What's funny to me is that I've eaten meals with my father as an adult during which he expressed that some dish or another was too spicy for him.  I had to point out to him that I attribute my current love of spicy foods to the foods he took me out to eat during my formative years.  To be fair, though, I've also always attributed my dark, dry sense of humor to him, yet I now find him numbingly humorless and stiff.

I guess the student has become the master now, in a number of ways.
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