Hot Stuff!

We are a household with one spicy food lover, one spicy food hater and one yet undecided but leaning towards loving spicy food maybe. I love hot and spicy food. As hot as I can get it. I am known to add cayenne pepper to everything from mac'n'cheese to soy-turkey sandwiches to tomato soup and brownies. Ketu is more conservative and prefers mostly bland to relatively mild foodstuffs. He always tries to order mild food at the Indian restaurant and regrets it horribly when he lets the older women who take our order talk him into getting medium.

So far A-chan has a penchant for hot and spicy food. *yay!* She loves salsa and will eat it to the exclusion of what one might otherwise consider to be 'real' food. When we went to the mexican restaurant recently I noticed that she was refusing her salsa. Uh-oh, I thought, it was too good to last. But after I stole her salsa bowl for my own nefarious purposes, adding lovely bunches of the hot sauce they keep on the table, she asked for it back and ate the whole thing! The next time we went to the restaurant she asked me to add the hot sauce for her.

Ketu and I both like hot mustard, though. Give us Dijon or Gulden's brown mustard and we're happy. I had held off on giving A-chan any, thinking that it might be too much for her. The other day I added tiny drops of mustard to her lunch tray as part of the design and she ate some, liked it and every bite of hot dog thereafter had to have mustard on it in order to get eaten.

Although she seemed to like spiciness in salsa and indian foods, I hadn't yet tried any asian foods with spice to them. At dinner last night she came and asked to try what I was having (Thai green curry with spice almost to the spoon-melting-point, rice and fried tofu with szechuan hot dipping sauce - which was very different from what she and Ketu were eating). I warned her that it was hot and spicy rice and did she still want to try it? Indeed she did. I gave her a small mouthful and watched her eat, then had this conversation:

me: "Was that good? Do you like spicy rice?"

A-chan: "mm-hmm, yep."

pause

A-chan: "make mouth feel better. drink punch."

me: "would you like more spicy rice?"

A-chan: "okay!"

me: "are you sure?"

A-chan: "like spicy rice, a-chan yes"

pause

A-chan: "make more punch, please?"