Culinary disaster.

I like to think of Manof and myself as the modern day Picaso of culinary art. By that I mean our work is generally a mess and looks hideous, but people seem to like it anyway. Our cooking has been known to explode in the oven, turn molten and leak out of the oven, burst into flames and even get on the ceiling. You may not believe me, but no word of a lie, if you visited Manof’s old house you would find a small filled in hole in the ceiling from when we flipped a pancake too high, it got stuck to the ceiling so instead of pulling it off with his hands, Manof poked it with a knife a bit too vigorously. But I can tell you in all honesty, nothing we have ever made has tasted bad. 

This is the story of a particularly memorable meal we shared. Manof and I have always favoured spices in our food, but being adventurous by nature, we always seek a new challenge. One day, we decided to put our heat tolerance to the test. We bought some ghost chillies from the internet. For those of you who don’t know, ghost chillies are the hottest commercially available chillies in the world. Their scoville rating is up to 1,000,000, which is the equivalent of 10,000 times hotter than Tabasco sauce. I would not recommend them to anyone without an above average heat tolerance. When they arrived they were dehydrated, so you need to put them in a bowl of water for twenty minutes before you use them in food. We decided to make a curry with our little peppers of death.
‘How many do you think we’ll need?’ asked Manof.
‘I don’t know, apparently they’re pretty hot. Five?’ I replied.
‘Five!? That’s a stupid idea, we’ll have no mouths left!’
Twenty minutes later, we drained the five ghost chillies from the water, chopped them up and threw them into the already bubbling mixture. As a sort of test to see what we were up against, we thought we’d drink shot glasses of the water they’d been soaking in. 3. 2. 1. Drink. It turns out the water absorbs a lot of spice from those chillies. A lot. Much more than we expected. After we’d finally stopped spluttering and coughing we realised the true extent of how bad an idea  was to put five chillies in the curry. Five! FIVE!

We dished out the epic meal, forged in the depths of hell, retaining the heat of it’s former residence and living again, a vengeful fire spirit out to destroy, our mouths and stomachs first in line. Perhaps that is where the name ‘Ghost chilli’ comes from. The first mouthful of this concoction was really not so bad at all. For the three seconds it took for the heat to hit you at least. It was the kind of heat that keeps on getting hotter, and there’s not much you can do to stop it. The second mouthful was agony. After that, we may as well have been eating Caesium. Manof managed three mouthfuls, but I was determined. The phantom fruit tortured my taste buds, reducing them to broken shadows of their former selves. Each mouthful was a bloody battle in the war of Capsaicin and Calamari. Finally, a stomach full of pain and smoke coming out of my nostrils, I stood victorious over the empty plate and downed several glasses of milk. A knock at the door cut my celebration short.

Manof answered, only to be greeted by our best friend Jonno. (I don’t think I conveyed quite enough sarcasm there, so just to clarify, Jonno is the last person anyone wants to see. Ever. See my earlier  post ‘Friends’). Without waiting for an invitation, Jonno barged in in his usual clumsy fashion, removing his snood and taking off his stupidly large boots.
‘Can I help you?’ asked Manof, clearly searching for at least some sort of request of permission to join us.
‘Nah dude, I was just walking past and thought I’d drop in.’
‘Of course you did.’ Manof replied in a frustrated manor.
‘Would you like some food?’ I asked from behind. This perked Manof up. We both know for a fact Jonno has the heat tolerance of a newborn fairy with no skin.

For someone who considers themselves a rough tough Viking warrior, he sure does cry a lot. Then again, I would cry all the time if I looked like that, so we have to give him some credit. After a lot of flailing around, we decided it’d be a good idea to get him a drink. Manof brought through a pint of black current cordial which Jonno drank instantly without pausing. Two minutes later, Jonno ran upstairs and vomited violently into the toilet.
‘That wasn’t diluted, was it?’ I asked. Manof just grinned. It’s probably cruel to laugh at another person’s misery in such a way, but if you spent the day with Jonno, you would understand my pain. That day will remain with me until the day I die. I will never forget the heat of a ghost chilli, nor the increasing redness of Jonno’s face as the heat from the chilli took it’s toll. i hope you have enjoyed the story. Thank you for reading. -CC