The garden is in full harvest right now. I both LOVE it and DREAD it! It's exciting to see what our time and effort and God's good grace yields us. It's also overwhelming to have to deal with such large quantities in the short span of a couple of days. There is just no way my family is gonna be eating all of those tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, corn . . . before it spoils, so , (sigh) the only alternative is preserve, right? Yesterday was jalapeno pepper day. In years past we've planted only 1 or 2 plants that we've used in our salsa. Jeff decided,(for reasons unknown to me), to plant 5 plants this year!! I DO have a weakness for breaded, deep fried, cream cheese stuffed jalapenos, but I've never made them at home and even then, we have WAY more peppers than we could possibly eat! I decided to freeze them. Yesterday afternoon, I assembled supplies. Knife, cutting board, seed scooper, and freezer bags. No gloves. I didn't have any and honestly, didn't think I 'd really need them anyway, after all, I EAT them without pain and suffering. All was going well, *wink, wink* , until I needed to blow my nose. I am a two tissue nose blower. No sense messin' around getting all snotty and nasty with one tissue and then havin' to clean yourself all up with another. Start with two - avoid the mess. :) Not a minute after I had blown my nose, my face began to burn! Through TWO tissues!! I severely underestimated the potency of the jalapeno!! That's also when I noticed my fingers were on FIRE! Everything continued to burn EVEN after I washed my hands 3 times. Hours later, I bathed 3 children and STILL everything was burning! I went to bed and woke up this morning to discover, my face and fingers were still burning!! LESSON LEARNED!!!
I made salsa several years ago without wearing gloves. I recall coaching a volleyball game later that day and the burn was coming through to the tops on my fingers.
ReplyDeleteGloves don't always work either. Years ago when I worked at the pickle factory, we were bottling peppers. I excused myself to use the little girls room. Even with removing my gloves and washing my hands, I got the burn. I must have looked silly as I had to be doing a dance while standing at the line.