I am a lover of spicey foods and chocolate sauce.  The one wounds, the other heals.  In fact, I’ve recommended my wife’s chocolate sauce, properly heated so you can just begin to smell the vanilla flavoring in it, as a medicinal remedy for your typical sore throat.  I say a spoonful of that stuff does wonders, both for your throat and your general outlook on life.

I suspicion I could get rich quick by marketing that chocolate sauce as cough syrup; the downside would be that folks would start abusing the stuff and it would soon be labeled an illegal drug, and then none of us could have it. 

Let’s keep it the way it is now.

I haven’t always had spicey food.  My mom is a good cook, without doubt.  But the home she was raised in, and it was the same with my dad, had post-depression era cooking influence.  Thus, they cooked simply, and with what they had on hand.  I ate a lot of hamburger growing up, and today it is still a favorite food of mine.

And then, one fine butcher day, I discovered how other folks made their sausage. 

You could say I’ve been actively engaged, or perhaps even married to, anything spicey since then. 

There’s a limit though.  Don’t give me a menu that says the entrée is spicey and to use great caution, etc., etc., and then have me eat that same dish and all the while search in vain for the thing they call spice.

No.

If it says spicey, I want it spicey.  Simple as that.  I’m old enough now, and after three times that I can vividly recall a total meltdown and going up in sweat and smoke, I’ll be careful.

I know you think I’m really pouring it on don’t you.  You probably think I’m one of those ankle biter dogs that makes a lot of noise and doesn’t have the guts to really bite, except tiny little nips in frantic forays of panic driven drivel.

And I know for a fact that I can’t handle it as hot as Bryce can. 

But I have to say that I was totally smoked, I’m mean stoked, this last week at the local Wendy’s.  They had two new sandwiches on their menu.  Both were chicken.  One was a barbeque type that really got me visually with the scrummy looking onion rings.  My wife got it.

The other was a jalapeno popper sandwich that featured a nice amount of some really good-looking creamy jalapeno cream cheese.  So, I went with it, figuring if it didn’t meet my spice criteria I could finish up with the last of my good wife’s sandwich.

Then, when I was ordering, the guy asked if I wanted homestyle, grilled or spicey. 

“I’ll take the spicey.” 

Let’s say I got my moneys worth that day.  Both in flavor and in spice.  Because not only was the chicken spicey, I counted close to 8 jalapeno’s lurking in its smokey interior.

And it happened to be the third time that I can vividly remember of a total meltdown and going up in sweat and smoke.

I’m gonna get me a ‘nother one.

*****

That love (of spicey and chocolate sauce) also made me instinctively choose who my wife would be. 

Not because she likes those two flavors.  It’s quite the opposite for her. 

But I’ve come to know her personality a bit better through the years.  And what I find today is about two equal parts of spicey and chocolate sauce.

The one wounds, the other heals.

And, in a good wife that’s exactly what you need. 

Because none of us are so good and sweet all the time that we don’t need a little something that burns in the truth once in a while. 

*****

Oh, and if you want that chocolate sauce recipe, message me.  Or my wife.

But I don’t want you to make cough syrup out of it.  That is my original idea, and if anybody’s going to get rich, it should be me.