So, last night I made a mango and black bean salsa to take to a marina party. I opened one too many cans of black beans, and diced too much red onion for the number of mangoes I had, so I refrigerated the left overs.
This morning, I sautéed the onions and beans and made weird Tex-Mex omelets.
We always use Rooster Sauce aka Sriracha aka Cock Sauce on egg dishes and today was no exception. But, when I opened the lid it sprayed a bit into the air. A droplet hit my cornea. Ouch. I screamed.
Then the phone rang. My son was calling from Florida, for reasons still not determined. We hadn’t talked in a while, so it was nice that he called. My gf answered the phone, and told him I’d have to call back, as I’d just gotten Cock Sauce in my eye. She was laughing and her exact words were, “your dad will have to call you back, he just got sprayed in the eye with Cock Sauce.”
My son said, “OMG, too much information!!!” And he hung up.
A few minutes later I called and tried to explain. But he was so weirded out he kept telling me to forget it. I eventually sent him some links that confirmed Sriracha is sometimes called Cock Sauce. He now says he believes me. What a morning.
If you have just made salsa with jalapenos and your contact lens is bothering you, it is impossible to wash your hands thoroughly enough to make it safe to take out said lens.
I keep disposable nitrile gloves under the kitchen sink. I typically put them on before handling chile peppers, but if you find yourself in this situation and ungloved, you may be dextrous enough with the gloves on to remove your contacts and avoid burning your eye.
I take this a step farther and use gloves not just for peppers but for raw meat/chicken as well. I put on the gloves, take the meat out of the package, do whatever I need to do with it, put it in the pan, put anything I used (cutting board/knife/bowl etc) into the already open dishwasher and take off/throw out the gloves. If I’m careful, when I’m done my hands and work surface are still sanitary and I can keep moving without stopping to clean.
Even if I’m not careful and have to, say, sanitize my counter or if I manged to get some on my arm, it’s still nice to not have ground chuck all over my hands or not have to handle raw chicken if I don’t have to.
And FTR, I’ve gotten hot peppers in my eyes by taking my contacts out. Even hours later and having washed my hands multiple times.
Yeah, I tend to use them for raw meat as well, when I have to do any extended handling of it. And I agree about using them whenever possible with chiles, before even picking up the pepper, as you can get that stuff under a nail or something and have it show up later at an unfortunate time.
There are plenty of things to keep out of your eye. Volcanic ash, chilli oil, toothpicks, mud, cat claws, shards of glass, chromic acid, any kind of tooth… in fact it’s probably easier to just list the things that you should put in your eye.
Sawdust. Some woods are extreme irritants, as I’m finding out. I don’t know if it’s the wenge, the bubinga, the purpleheart or something more mundane like maple, but it acts like an allergy attack.
Super glue. A friend of mine accidentally grabbed a bottle of nail glue (same as super glue) instead of eye drops. Her eye was immediately glued shut. The ER doc had to pluck out every eyelash because they were glued together. Then, he opened her eye and peeled the polymerized glue off the surface. Amazingly, she is absolutely fine, no eye damage, no vision loss. It took a couple of months for her eyelashes to grow back. She no longer carries nail glue in her purse.
We were watching The Graham Norton Show last night, and they had this Kiwi guy in The Big Red Chair. His story was that he had to give his dad some eyedrops, so he reached for the bottle on top of the fridge and put six or seven in. He’d grabbed the super glue accidentally.
He said his dad now sleeps with one eye open. (Which doesn’t make sense if you take it his eye was glued shut, but it got a laugh.)
I was opening a pop-top can of chili and the lid was really poorly-designed. It flicked chili sauce onto my face and in my eye. Total jerk. Good thing it wasn’t spicy.
