Burning love
This may be my last entry…
Last night I failed to blog. It was a concious decision and not one I took lightly. This week I have been feeling a bit at odds with writing. I’ve been having difficulty finding inspiration and then, inspiration found (or suggested) I have felt dissatisfied with the results. Perhaps the problem isn’t so much writer’s block as a lack of direction. I’m not doing enough in my day to day to allow me to blog successfully – that is something I must and will change. The time has come to inject a little excitement in my life.
Speaking of which…
Today was the 5th Birmingham Chilli Festival in Brindley Place. A small but well appointed affair focussed solely on the devil’s fruit. I do like chillies but I can’t claim to have a fire-proof mouth. I tried a couple of extremely hot sauces including a devilish Carolina Reaper sauce from Fire Foods (not a sponsor) which left Mrs CthuIu searching for milk and certainly had a long hot burn to it. I ended up buying some Trinidad Moruga Scorpion seeds to replace my sad plant, a piquant and peppy piccalilli and a live, healthy Apache chilli plant with plenty of fruit to be harvested. I bought the plant because it is late season now and I want to see if I can keep it alive over winter.
After the obligatory and eye-watering chilli eating competition, won for the second year running and in impressive style by local woman Lou Witterick, we headed of to get some food and go home. While Mrs C went off to get the drinks in I decided that then would be a good time to try an Apache chilli for the first time.
Apache’s weigh in at 75,000 on the Scoville scale which is something in the region of 15 times hotter than a Jalapeño. To me that’s a manageable chilli – or so I thought!
The initial flavour is delicious. It’s sweet and fruity but then the heat comes in and won’t let go. If I had liquid in my mouth the heat immediately went away but as soon as the liquid was gone the pain returned. I was hiccuping, coughing and streaming from my eyes and nose. In other words, it was amazing. They are going to go so well in a chilli con carne!
We got a taxi home and I chatted to the Indian driver about how, contrary to popular belief, chillies were introduced to the subcontinent from South America. Prior to that ‘Indian’ food was flavoured with black pepper. I also explained that Vindaloo is a Portuguese dish meaning Wine and Potatoes (Vin d’aloo). He was a really decent bloke and I left him one of my chillies as a tip (it was Uber so he got his 5 star bonus too – I’m not a tip-dodger)
In all it has been a great day and it managed to take my mind off tomorrow when I go for an MRI. I’m pretty sure you can guess what tomorrow’s blog will be about.
Thanks for reading, now feel the burn!
Conniving the Cuttlefish 