Wednesday, September 07, 2011

Jalapeno Regrets

A few weeks ago I decided to try canning salsa to try and use up all the extra tomatoes from the garden. I found a recipe online and was very careful to follow the recipe exactly. I know that with canning it's important to follow recipes as closely as possible. However there was one instruction that seemed a bit extreme: "we recommend wearing latex gloves while chopping the jalapenos".

I've chopped up one or two jalapenos in the past and never had any problems so I thought, that's great advice but not necessary. So I went ahead and chopped up 8 jalapenos without gloves.

An  hour later, my hands were on fire. I washed them, I scrubbed them and went about the rest of my day trying to ignore my pulsing hands. 8 hours later as I sat in bed trying to ignore my hands that seemed to only heat up even more as I laid still trying to fall asleep, I thought there has got to be something to make it stop.

I turned to google and tried everything. One site suggested trying lime or lemon juice. So I rummaged through the fridge and found some lemon juice and rubbed it all over my hands. It helped for a little bit but within 10 minutes my hands were heating up again. So it was on to attempt number two: heavy cream. One site suggested using a milk product to help stop the pain. We head some heavy cream in the fridge and so I soaked my hands in it for about 5 minutes.

To my amazement, the pain actually started going away. Just to make sure, I put some aloe on my hands and took some Tylenol too. 20 minutes later the pain was still gone from my right hand and only slightly there on my left (I think my left hand touched the jalapeno's more than my right).

All I can say is that next time, I'll pay more attention to the seemingly pointless instructions in recipes.

No comments:

Post a Comment