Pepper Power

I decided to make my own Buffalo sauce last night for our Buffalo chicken wraps. It turned out pretty tasty, but the process was a bit of a dramatic ordeal.

I had fried up my chicken and that alone takes a lot of counter space so I was working with limited mobility. I cut up my pepper and placed it in the sauce pan with water to cover it and turned the burner on. I began preparing the other ingredients and the pepper pan began to steam. It was supposed to cook for about 10 minutes so I worked around it for a while and then suddenly began coughing. At first it didn’t register with me that it was the pepper causing it and then I realized the steam was blowing toward me as I worked. I turned the fan on after a while and thought it would remain in the general area of the stove. It didn’t. Pretty soon Owen and Ivan who were already at the table eating chicken fingers began coughing. A few minutes after that I heard poor little Aron who was in the living room quite a ways away coughing. Kris heard the racket and came downstairs and immediately started coughing. The burner had been turned off and the kitchen window open and we were still hacking like crazy. I was apologizing to everyone and taking tissues to the boys, running off to the bathroom to blow my nose, washing my hands incessantly and trying to finish that stupid sauce so we could eat. Owen coughed so hard he actually vomited at the table…this helped a lot. While things are still in chaos, Kris came in and told me that there is a very big storm coming through. I had to feed the baby so I told him that if it started raining he would need to close the windows. Sure enough as Aron was about halfway done eating the wind picked up immensely. I think the minute or so that it took Kris to come in and close the windows was just enough time for that wind to draw out the last of the pepper air because we all seemed to calm down after that. I cleaned up the boys and they called grandma to wish her a happy birthday (Happy Birthday mom!) and while they were on the phone the tornado siren for Mt. Juliet went off. We all huddled in the hallway for a little while under the guise of reading a bedtime story. It wasn’t long as the storm was very fast moving and we soon got up and herded the boys off to bed.

And then…we ate.

As the sauce turned out well I will probably not ban the recipe from the house, I will however find another way to cook it. And let me just say…I probably had the wrong type of pepper as well. I don’t know my peppers and Kroger had a bin of peppers that weren’t marked. I couldn’t find a label anywhere. I pulled out what I thought was the pepper I needed for this recipe and another pepper I thought I needed for another recipe. Neither were marked and I really don’t know what I bought. I just looked at both recipes this morning and in my haste last night I used the pepper for the other recipe last night so I think I got them all mixed up and who knows if I had the right thing for either one to start with. I need to look up some peppers and see if I can figure out what happened. Them peppers is powerful stuff.