Bajan pepper sauce, and a life lesson

Things are not always what they seem...

I have not posted for the past 2 days, although I have actually written a few posts over the past few days. I toyed with the idea of posting them all in bulk, but since I am aware that it is difficult to keep up with reading the posts as fast as I am writing them, I have decided to continue posting daily from now until the end of the month, and let the posts spill into the early part of November. But I could not deprive you of New Recipe Sunday.

Today I tried my hand at making bajan pepper sauce. I say new recipe Sunday, but it is a bit of a misnomer, since I didn’t use a recipe, instead I took instructions from the lady at Bridgetown market who sold me the hot peppers. I actually made two sauces today – one from some ridiculously hot peppers, and the other from flavor peppers. Flavor peppers are interesting. They look like hot peppers, and sometimes they are very hard to distinguish from their hot brothers. In fact, when I bought the flavor peppers, I had an interesting conversation with the lady who sold them to me. She mentioned that they are almost indistinguishable from the hot peppers on the tree, and sometimes they are actually hot, and you can get two peppers from the same tree that have opposing levels of heat. She said one day she popped one into a chili and it was only when she tasted the finished product, she realized what she had done.

However, I seem to have lucked out, and was able to keep the hot and flavor peppers separate, and was able to make two sauces, one a true hot pepper sauce, and the other for flavor that I can add to soups and sauces quite easily, without fear of burning a hole in my tongue. But on first glance, like the peppers, they look very similar, almost the same. And it got me thinking about how sometimes things look like one thing, and they can actually be something else. Like how a pepper that appears to be mild from the flavor pepper tree can be scorching hot… Like how the disappointment of not being offered a job could be an opportunity to take the road less travelled… Like how an exam to be retaken could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship with another candidate… Like how a failed procedure or unexpected diagnosis could be the catalyst to a necessary journey… About how a seemingly negative experience could be the best thing that ever happened. I have seen all of these things happen in my life. Sometimes things are not what they seem at first, and so now whenever something happens, I pause to think about what other possible outcome could be available.

I will let you know how the pepper sauce tastes in a few days. Until then, I bring you big love from a small island.