Hot Peppers: A cautionary tale - and a remedy

Miraculously, our pepper plants survived a few hard frosts under a sheet of heavy plastic weighted down with rocks. I'd half expected the bell peppers to hang on, but was astonished that the frost hadn't killed off my hot peppers. The leaves are all pretty much gone, but the stems and stalks are still green, so I'm hopeful that the last handful will ripen in this glorious Indian summer weather.

And so this afternoon I made hot sauce with a dozen red chilis, half a dozen jalapenos, and two habaneros. But I didn't just cut up the peppers. I also lovingly and meticulously took out every last seed and separated each one from the membranes to dry on waxed paper for planting next year. (More about that in another post.)

I always use vinyl gloves when I'm working with hot peppers.

Oh, not true! I didn't today. I know they're hot, and I know how hot they are, so I'm careful - very careful. I washed my hands in OCD fashion most of the afternoon - repeatedly and thoroughly - with lots of hot, soapy water, and kept my hands away from my eyes.

Oh, not true! When I came into the kitchen to make supper, after working in front of a computer screen for a few hours, I absent-mindedly rubbed my eyes - hard - and felt an immediate, blinding heat. My eyes closed reflexively, and when I tried to open them, there was searing pain, so I kept them closed and sat on the couch. Four thoughts swirled through my mind:

• How do I get the pain to stop?
• Am I going to go blind?
• Now I know how pepper spray works.
• This is going to be a great story!

Mike went online to research "hot peppers" and "eyes". Not surprisingly, I'm not the first person to ever do this.

"Rinse your eyes with milk," he said.

"Not happening," I said. "I can't open my eyes."

"Rinse your eyes with saline solution," he offered.

"I can't open my eyes," I repeated.

Then I remembered what I'd told him that afternoon when he was surprised by the heat in a jalapeno and reached for a glass of water: "No, no, not water. Water just makes it worse. Bread. Eat bread. It absorbs the heat."

Then I remembered my great-great-aunt's solution for everything: bread poultices. Bingo!

Mike took a small piece of bread and dribbled milk on it to soften it. I held the poultice to each eye, and the pain vanished instantly. In less than 10 seconds, my eyes were open and it was as though the whole thing had never happened. Miraculous!

Lessons learned:

To prevent hot pepper burns to your eyes, wear gloves when handling peppers.

To remedy hot pepper burns to your eyes, use a bread-and-milk poultice!