Now that I spend most of my work days in Monterey, where the food is good, but shall we say mild, I find myself making up for lost time on the weekends.
El Yucateco XXXL hot sauce in.. POTATO SALAD! Everything! When I get home :)
Not quite at the hot sauce in my pocket stage, but soon
Eating here feels like the inversion of how I’ve eaten most of my life.
Back in Singapore / Malaysia / Thailand, everything was spicy by default and you had to go out of your way to eat un-spicy foods and cuisines
Here, I have to add spicy to almost everything
Still haven’t adjusted. Some days if I go for more than 3 days without a capsaicin hit to my brain that is strong enough to notice, I get very very sad
Possibly also why I default to eating Mexican food when I eat out here. Most Mexican cuisines taste close to what I like to eat. I still have to add a ton of hot sauce. Thankfully I live very close to the two Thai places in SF that do ‘thai spicy’ by default (unlike everywhere else) so I don’t even have to ask. Or I order in Thai to really bump it up.
Hot take: Eating not spicy food as a person who prefers spicy food is just as painful as eating spicy food for someone who doesn’t like it
@skinnylatte I like my food to be fairly spicy and for awhile I was working to up my spice tolerance but I've never been able to get even close to tolerating Thai spicy
how cultures that like spice manage to reach the point where that is just average food that average people eat is extremely impressive to me
@waitworry easy, we eat chillies for fun
I’ve been doing that since I was 3 or 4
Food was just food, not ‘spicy food’ and there was not toned down version for kids or ‘introducing kids to spicy food’
Literally just ‘open your mouth and eat a Birds Eye chilli for fun and games’
@skinnylatte that's what I've always particularly wondered about is the children
@waitworry might have changed now but that’s how my wife and I grew up
Might also depend on one’s cultural background. Many Chinese families may not really eat super spicy but mine did. I was surprised to meet Cantonese people who lived their entire lives in Malaysia but never ate anything slightly spicy. It was totally different to my food upbringing where everyone loved chilli and we made our own special chilli sauces