Some Like It Hot

My town, Pinellas Park, Florida, is home to the Pinellas PepperFest, a week-end long celebration of everything peppery.

We had hot sauces of every description!

It’s not just the hot sauces, contained in smallish bottles that look … cute … with their bright labels and cartoon characterizations of smiling, steaming, smoking, and exploding peppers.

Oh, no. There’s salsa, ranging from the mild-enough-for-Norwegians stuff that I like, to the cut-through-your-tongue-and-the-Earth’s-crust varieties that Barry-sweetie and my sister Tracie enjoy.

There’s pepper jelly. Just what a kid wants after school. Peanut butter and scorched mouth sandwich, honey? Gee, thanks, Mom!

And pepper vinegar.

Catch-a-Fire had products galore.

What amazed me was pepper ice cream.

Let me wrap my mind around the idea of eating a freezing bowl of … heat. I live in Florida. Our ice cream needs to be … icy.

But you wouldn’t know it at the PepperFest. From 10 am to 4 pm on Saturday (11 to 4 on Sunday), people hot-footed it to Pinellas Park, traveling as much as three HOURS to join in this pepper party, sample the samples, and buy the bottles of peppery concoctions.

We had vendors from all edges of the state, converging with their heat-packing products on this central Pinellas County community, and they found plenty of customers for everything from larval peppers (the plants, guys; the plants) to the aged, processed, and packaged foods guaranteed to give a kick to any dish.

I took Barry-sweetie along to be my roadie as I interviewed vendors and tasters, using my digital video cam to record their comments for posterity (and my Chamber of Commerce’s website) and we ran into an old pal from our coffeehouse days.

Ah, those days. Even then, I was aware that Barry followed the fiery fruit … er … veggie.

My idea of eating on the wild side was making a meal of a stuffed green bell pepper. I’d use sweet yellow bells to flavor a salad, and chop red bells for my spaghetti sauce. Barry? He sought the ultimate heat-dealing pepper sauces to spice up everything.

So the year we discovered in each other an amorous intent, I decided to make his Christmas present something that spoke to his inner hottie: I went searching for the ultimate hot sauce to stuff in his stocking.

FOUND IT! There was a Dave’s Pepper (Palace? Place? I don’t remember) at the St. Petersburg Pier, and in the cramped confines of this spicy specialty shop I found … Dave’s Insanity Hot Sauce, a guaranteed to beat the heat of any other pepper, to sear the palate of even the most seasoned of pepper fans.

I bought two. The guy behind the counter rang up the order in shocked appreciation.

“You know,” he instructed, “you can’t use more than a drop or two for every two quarts of whatever you’re putting it in.”

Even my Norwegian palate thought he was pulling my leg, but he was insistent. “Try it after you add one drop,” he urged. “Don’t just go right for two.” Uh-huh.

I was so determined to keep Barry’s gift a surprise that I stopped on the way home to wrap it up. And it was only August! No mean feat to find Christmas wrap in August in Florida, but we have shops for just about everything. Hey: we play sports year ‘round around here; we shop for Christmas in July, too!

I took the festively garbed hot sauce home and hid it away. Almost forgot about it. Almost.

Came Christmas morning, and I was rummaging in my “everything” drawer, frantically looking for The Gift. FOUND IT! Just in time for Barry’s early-morning visit.

Oh, man, talk about a gift that hits it out of the park! Barry couldn’t believe I’d found a pepper sauce he didn’t know about. Didn’t believe me when I told him the one-drop-before-two-drops rule. Couldn’t wait to go home and whip up a batch of his pilaf.

The pilaf is another story. I tried it once. Thought my insides were going to fall out when… nevermind.

Well. He ignored my emphatic one-drop advice on purpose. All macho-pepper-user, he shook maybe six drops out of the bottle and into his gallon-sized pressure cooker. Cooked his pilaf to completion. Stirred it up and looked into its depths and saw that it was good.

Took a whiff and cleared his sinuses for six weeks.

And he still scooped out a bowlful and took a big mouthful in.

And spit a big mouthful out into his sink, reaching for the tomato juice that happened to be not there.

I think he found some lemon juice to kill the spicy heat that lingered on his taste buds for a day or two.

When he could talk without his eyes and nose leaking profusely, he called to thank me.

Let me say that again: he called to THANK me. Barry was actually impressed that I, a non-pepper-sauce kinda gal, had found one hot as hell bottle of pepper sauce. And I’d bought TWO!

My place in his heart was sealed.

Michele Northrup from Intensity Academy (Tampa), 2-time winner of the Customers' Choice Award at Pinellas PepperFest.