Today I decided to take advantage of my ample spare time and the nice day and check out our local farmer's market. I got all excited to find some yummy local produce like cantelope and watermelon and strawberries! Gracie said she wanted to get blueberries which I have had a terrible time in the past getting her to eat, so I was super excited to get her to try a blueberry! Well, then we got there and there were a handful of booths set up and only two actually had produce. One had some vegetables, lettuce, cabbage, potatoes and the like. The other had our delicious strawberries. Everything else was just a bunch of homemade condiments, spices, baked goods and such. It was a little disappointing, but I decided to make the best of it and see what treasures I could find. So we end up at the salsa booth, yum! Just as we got there the wind picked up and started to take the tent with it and just out of instict I grabbed one of the poles before it could fly away, but there was a brief moment I thought the tent was going to get airborn anyway and this time with me attached! After that I decided to try some of the salsas. I was trying this one and that one attempting to find one I thought would go well with the tamales I just bought (which were another disappointment, I might add). Finally I saw one salsa sitting behind another one. This one didn't have a label, but it looked like pico de gallo, which is my favorite! I grabbed a chip and got a big healthy scoop and popped it in. Immediatley I knew this wasn't pico de gallo and the big chunks of what I thought were tomatoes were very certainly not friendly, sweet tomatoes. Something was terribly wrong. My eyes were welling up and my tongue started tingling. Then the tingling turned into burning, but not a curling iron burn, this was a Mt. Vesuvius burn. My eyesight went blurry around the edges and it felt like I was in a tunnel because there was a dull thrum in my ears. Beads of sweat are forming on my forhead and I swear I felt my heart stop for a moment. I have no idea where my kids are at this point because I am incapcitated due to Dante's Inferno (seventh ring) in my mouth and now creeping down my throat so that I won't be able to cry out for help. I have visions of shrieking through the park to reach the fountain so I can put my mouth directly over one of the spouts...one of the really big ones. After what seemed like an eternity and what I am sure was a vision of the afterlife, I started to come back to my senses, although I am now starting to cough and my nose is running like it's flu season. When I see the woman from the booth I croak out the burning question (haha) "what kinda of salsa is that?" She looked at me a little funny and then said "Oh, that's a Habenero salsa". Oh, well of course it is. Thank you for labeling it so clearly so that unsuspecting, salsa-loving rubes like myself can have an out of body experience. I had no water, no milk, no bread...nothing to soothe my ever fading and forever altered taste buds. My mouth will undoubtedly have PTSD from this experience and every time I look at pica de gallo, there will be a flashback and I will break into a cold sweat and get into the fetal position mumbling something about a lying salsa lady.. I love spicy food, but this "salsa" went so far beyond spicy that the sound from spicy will take 1,000 light years to reach this devil's concoction. At least the strawberries were good, at least that's what I hear from my kids, since everything seems to taste like wood to me now.
Gabe opted for the cookie
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