Have A Little Pasta With Your Pepper...

I am dedicating this post to my very best friend in Canada (you know who you are, or you BETTER from that title) and her little brother.

The joke is this:

We were camping one summer at her family's cottage and the camp put on a pig roast. The thought was great! The meat was not. We tried everything to make this meat taste better than it did. I should explain that I'm not a pork person to begin with (except when it comes to Jamon!) so I wasn't excited about this meal before it was even served. We tried it with mustard, ketchup, BBQ sauce... anything they had on hand at the cottage. Our selection was limited. My bestie's little brother decided to try pepper. He put so much pepper on his meat that the joke became: "Have a little meat with your pepper".

Well... I bet you can guess where this post is going.. and if you can't, here's the story:

I decided to make myself a nice dinner tonight. Penne pasta with some cherry tomatoes, onions, zucchini and tomato sauce. Now, the tomato sauce here in Spain is a little different than in North America. It is what it is. By that, I mean that it is JUST tomato sauce. There are no chunks of this or that, no spices, no... flavour. So, I decided to see what my roommates had on hand to spice up my somewhat bland looking dinner. (Veggies are great, but I'm used to sauce with personality, and the sauce here is sadly lacking in that department. If I had to go on a date with the tomato sauce here, I'd be replaying Friends episodes in my head by the time the appetizers were ordered.).

Hmm. What do they have? Well, they have a whole lot of things that smell nice, but not for pasta, and I can't read the labels, so I don't actually know what they are (excpet currie and cinnamon.. neither of which did I want in my sauce). And then I spotted it. Pepper. Perfect, punchy pepper. I added a little, put the jar back, and continued making my meal.

Taste test!

It's still missing something. So I reach for the pepper to add some more and clumsy, not-paying-attention me, opens the wrong end of the spice jar and I dump the remainder of the pepper into my pasta. *look of horrified shock*.

So now I am sitting, trying to enjoy the meal that I am crying through, trying to be positive thinking of how much water weight I am losing by sweating it out of my very open pores. The heat in my mouth is similar to what I imagine drinking fire would be like.

Next time, I'll have a little pasta with my pepper.

*no photos will be added to this post, partly because you wouldn't be able to see the pepper and partly because I am very shiny right now.