I never knew I would...

...spread a pat of butter across my eyelid in a feat of desperation.

courtesy of Cooking Light

When my family goes to the beach, we tend to do a lot of cooking. And Wednesday we decided to recreate these Grilled Stuffed Jalapenos, featured in last month's Cooking Light Magazine. They are delicious. Unfortunately, I committed a huge jalapeno blunder.

In order (for most) to comfortably eat a jalapeno, the veins and the seeds of the pepper have to be cut out of the center, because those are the parts of the pepper that contain the capsaicin, which make it spicy. In helping my mom with this process, I ran each pepper half under water to rinse out all of the seeds so that no one would get an unpleasant surprise. But I took one for the team.

After I finished my job, I meticulously washed my hands with soap and water so that I wouldn't get any of that pesky capsaicin under my nails. 

That happened to me last year while making stir-fry in London and I had to soak my fingers in 2% milk - fat neutralizes capsaicin and makes it stop burning.

 I then absent-mindedly pushed a chunk of hair (aka grown-out bangs) out of my face. And my eyelid felt like I had struck a match on it.

I must not have been as meticulous as I thought I'd been, because my eyelid was burning, and I was really afraid that if I didn't do something soon the capsaicin would make its way into my eye.

I rummaged through the fridge in the futile hope that we had some milk other than skim, but shocker(!) there was none to be found. All that healthy eating coming back to bite me in the ass.  

The next thing I saw was a stick of butter in the covered compartment in the door. I didn't want to. I hoped for any other alternative. But there was no other answer (yeah, I'm a huge baby).

I whipped out a dinner knife, hurriedly unwrapped the stick, sliced off a piece. I bounded up to the bathroom and, with a look of disgust on my face, smeared it on my eyelid. 

Oh, and yeah, it worked. 

I thought it was ironically fitting that I watched the Barefoot Contessa make Jeffrey an anniversary cake while the butter worked its magic. Cause that cake had loads of buttercream frosting. 

I don't know what lesson you have learned from my story - either to always buy milk with some fat in it, wear rubber gloves while cleaning peppers, or simply that I'm embarrassingly stupid wonderfully glamorous - but those grilled stuffed jalapenos are damn good.