Today I cooked for an arsehole.
I do not like said arsehole and would normally draw the line at cooking for arseholes, but I was assured by F (whose judgement I generally… well, do not trust to be honest, because she’s a very random person) that he’s probably being an arsehole because he’s trying to impress his new girlfriend, her friend N. We both are very confused at the straight guy thing of acting like an arsehole to impress girls. Peacocks have shiny feathers, stags have antlers, straight guys have loud, showing-off arseholery. Does it actually work?
Anyway, said arsehole had previously expressed his taste for very spicy food, but that neither I nor F could possibly understand for I am not a real man and she is a delicate little flower of womanhood so neither of us could possibly handle spicy food.
Uh-huh.
Now I am partial to hot food and will cook with all kinds
of spice, chilli etc, but I generally disapprove of the macho posturing of
making food blisteringly hot for the sake of it. Heat should enhance the dish
or be a natural side effect of those flavours – actually setting out to make
food painfully hot so you can prove how tough you are strikes me as
ridiculously childish and a waste of perfectly good food. Also, I think a lot
of spicy food should (and usually is) served with a cooling agent – soured
cream, yogurt, guacamole, chutney, raita, salads, tzatziki, etc.
I would never ever make food ridiculously hot just to
prove that I (and F) can handle far hotter food than he and he should go home
sobbing like a little boy. Of course not.
Cooking extremely nice food where the heat is an entirely
natural part of the food process and adds to its delicious flavour and just
happens to be very very hot indeed? Why, it’s a pure coincidence, I assure you!
It was even optional! Crispy fried chicken (in my own
spice mix. Which wasn’t hot. Much. *ahem*) and dipping sauces: piri piri,
Mexican chilli and tomato and Thai sweet chilli.
Did I mention that Beloved’s
Bird’s Eye Chilli plant has a truly impressive crop of teeny tiny red chillies?
He was quite capable, at any time, of recognising the
sauces were far far too hot for him and kept to the sour cream and hoi sin
dips. And just because F and I were double dipping didn’t mean he had to, now,
did it?
Oh how I do love to cook for people J.
