This past weekend I took an inventory of the various canned goods in our pantry to see if there was anything I could pull together for meals this week. I found many things I didn’t know we had, such as country French dressing, Thousand Island dressing and a bottle of spicy brown mustard identical to the one I bought at the store the week before. I should probably inventory the pantry more frequently than every 18 months.
There were also two cans of coconut milk in my pantry so I decided to search the net for recipes to build around them. I found this one on Allrecipes.com and proceeded to throw it together after work last night. I looked just like the kind of recipe I’d like; easy and ready within a half hour.
If you clicked on the link to the recipe, you may have noticed the recipe description:
“This simple chicken in a vibrant coconut milk sauce will fill your kitchen with the enticing aromas of South American cooking…”
What that description omits, however, is this handy bit of information:
…but will choke your family as though a S.W.A.T. team has just thrown a cannister of mustard gas into your living room.”
Everything was fine until the chicken started cooking. Then Autumn started coughing, then Nathan started coughing and of course I was the last to start coughing because I’ll be damned if I was going to admit it was my cooking that was making everyone so miserable. Pretty soon we were wallowing in a toxic cloud that did not go away after I finally had enough sense to cover the pan with a lid.
The dish itself was so-so, and I imagine if you were born and raised in Hell it might not have been too hot for you. There was no way Autumn was going to eat any of it so we shoved some Dino nuggets into the toaster oven and called it good. There was no need to make her suffer any further.
Of course our house is closed up and the AC is on because it is, in fact, hot as hell out, so there was no way for those South American aromas to escape. I went to bed last night smelling that meal still and vowed never again to put a whole teaspoon of Cayenne pepper into anything unless I actually intend to kill.
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