Salsa Adventures

A few days ago Steve and Stephanie asked me what foods I was starting to miss from back in the states. At the time I wasn't quite sure, but maybe thinking about it for a couple of days helped to clarify things. So today, as I was walking through the grocery store, I realized that I had a craving for corn chips and salsa. Which are delicious.

So I went to the chip aisle. The only corn chips they had were Doritos (in the super-sweet, non-U.S. flavors, of course), but that isn't really what I was looking for. Failure #1. Then I walked over to the aisle where there theoretically ought to be salsa. I wasn't expecting a grand selection or anything, but all they had was mango salsa. Delicious, but not what I was looking for... Failure #2.

On my way out of the store, however, I came across a pack of "chapaties," which looked strangely identical to tortillas, and an idea sparked into my head -- why not make chips and salsa?!? What could possibly be more delicious? What could possibly go wrong? How hard can it be? So I got a bunch of veggies and headed home.

Kamryn and I decided that we wanted to make our treat as a surprise for dinner, and Bradyn joined in a little bit later. Jennifer Rhoda hung out with us for a while taking pictures with my camera, talking on my phone, and wearing my backpack.



Anyways, the girls and I chopped up tons of tomatoes and onions and garlic and green/red peppers for the salsa, and we got the tortillas cut up into "chip" shapes. The recipe we found said that we needed to brush the chips with veggetable oil before baking them, so as I was working on chopping stuff, Bradyn and Kamryn found some oil in a cool little spray bottle, and we put it on the chips. I used three red peppers in the salsa, but made sure to take the seeds out first.

We finished up the first batch of chips, and the salsa, just as dinner was ready. But as we started to try out the goods, we quickly realized that some things were amiss:

1) First of all, the stuff that the girls sprayed on the chips is not what we thought it was. Somehow it made the chips really hot (as in spicy), so that as Kamryn tried her first chip, she started coughing and needed to drink a ton of water.

2) When I tasted my first chip, I realized that the salsa was VERY hot. I mean, hotter than Seattle weather right now. :) I was ok with it, but Bradyn could only have a little bit before needing a big glass of water. Soon the girls were actually crying because their mouths were burning so much. When we went back to the Allen's house Stephanie googled "chili pepper burns" and was able to soothe things a bit, but then at dinner Kamryn rubbed her eyes with some pepper juice on her hands. Ouch. That hurts like the dickens, so dinner was interrupted with some more crying.

So all that being said, an innocent chips and salsa surprise turned into a massive crisis with on-the-fly medical care administered via milk and yogurt and olive oil. Maybe next time I can try to avoid using the hottest peppers in the universe for a makeshift corn chip dip. Or maybe we can search for a "mild" recipe :)