It's Not the Heat, it's the Warmth

So we began a Salsa challenge while in the heat-infused days of Lafayette, LA, home of Tabasco and other sundry spices.  A neighborhood challenge.  A throw-down, Bobby-Flay style.

People always wondered why my salsa was extraordinarily chunky.  Carved almost from a dull blade.  Not the small, piece-meal stuff you get in a chain restaurant...mine had girth (a smile at that word), mine had heft.  Mine broke the chips but more importantly, like the taste of a kiss from a girl with freshly applied strawberry lip-gloss, mine remained tingling on the tongue and on the lips.

It was in the smallest of smalls, the tiniest of morsels.  Literally the devil in the details.  To find the hottest on the Scoville scale of chilis (not quite nuclear, but much more enticing than the somewhat mainstream Jalapeno).   Scientific fact:  The jalapeno, a green very sturdy pepper yields about 2500-8000 on the Scoville rating; my little precious is somewhere near the 100,00o-350,000 mark).    It's like dating Britney Spears before the head-shaving or Jessica Simpson from the "Newlyweds" vs. the somewhat pudgy one.  That kind of hot.

But it's the subtlety of hotness, the unveiling in an almost lingerie fashion...yeah, this tastes pretty good, pretty nice, pretty tasty....holy shit, this is melting my teeth!  So, it's the tiniest of slivers in an almost castle of flavors that suddenly pokes you to get your attention.

It's also the greatest therapy that I've come to know.  The chopping, the slicing, the dicing, the mincing.  Throughout it all it is the mixing.  It is the salting.  It is the tasting.  I try to create a cacophony of colors, a deluge of greens, yellows and reds.  In winter I stick to Christmas colors and in fall the colors of leaves.  

The purpose, however, is to introduce.  To take something that is ordinary, seen everyday in supermarkets and grocery stores, all aligned and assembled and nicely arranged.  And like the individual piece parts of a nuclear weapon, when exactly pieced together creates a nuclear yield.  It explodes in your mouth.  It is lulled first to sleep then awakened to an explosion.

My salsa.  It makes me proud.  It reflects that way I want to impact people.  It causes them to pause.  It is something that some folks find addicting.  And I'll be honest.  I want them to want more.