Feeling the heat

The morning cup of tea is generally a soothing ritual, gently easing me out of lingering drowsiness and into the waking world. This morning, on the other hand, my tea jerked me to alertness: one sip and my lips started to tingle and burn.

It wasn't the tea--a harmless infusion of Moroccan Mint--and it wasn't the temperature. It was the mug.

Why would a mug make my lips burn? For the same reason our house smells piquant and my husband's hands are dangerous: yesterday we transformed a pile of hot peppers into a hot pepper sauce that suffused the entire house with a wonderfully hot tangy fruity smell that could make your eyes water if you got too close.

My husband prepped all the peppers (wearing gloves, which didn't prevent his hands from burning and spreading the burn everywhere they wandered) and washed up afterward, dumping some other dishes in with the peppery pots. Everything that came into contact with that dishwater still simmers with the heat of habaneros.

I supervised the process in between online teaching tasks, tasting the concoction and telling him when to add more salt, more vinegar, a dash of sugar. The result is an amazingly lethal but delicious hot sauce...and hot hands and a hot mug and who knows what else?

We made enough hot sauce to last for months, so even on the coldest, bleakest days of winter, long after the pepper taste has faded from my tea mug, we'll still be feeling the heat.