¡Picante!

I pretty much disliked guacamole till one afternoon lunch. Me and my husband were in downtown Cancun and went in for lunch at a beach side restaurant. As Bengalis, our love for fish is nothing new and being in Mexico we decided to try out different types of fish. This time we ordered a baked fish (I think it was trout) served on a bed of rice. The waitress served us hot tortilla chips along with some salsa and half-an-hour later the fish arrived in a huge platter wrapped in aluminum foil. It looked and smelt so grand once the foil was removed -- two big pieces of fish marinated in spices and baked to perfection.
“Can we have some salsa?” my husband asked the waitress.
"Picante?" she asked.
My software engineer husband processed the English equivalent of picante and a moment later he appproved of picante. So our picante arrived in a tiny red bowl a minute later. It was a darkish-green colored paste. Our lunch was going along fine...the marriage of all the spices tingled our taste buds...until I decided to smear a piece of my fish with a little bit too much of the green paste. And that was when all hell broke loose (to use a very clichéd phrase). There was fire in my mouth. I could feel steam gushing out through my ears as my nose started watering and my whole face turned red. I gulped down a liter of ice cold water in no time. (Normally I don't take cold water and always remind the servers to give me water with 'no ice', not 'without ice' but ‘no ice’ because they don't seem to understand 'without ice'.) But nothing seemed to improve. If there was a water drinking competition at the time I’d have won it hands down. Meanwhile my husband was busy taping my condition on camera and with a smiling face told me "Have the guacamole".
If it had not been for the fire in my mouth I wouldn’t have let him go for enjoying himself at my expense. But my priorities were different now and I did just as he told. After having one spoonful of the guacamole, a thing which I disliked until now the burning sensation seemed to lessen by quite a considerable amount and I gulped down two-three spoonfuls in quick succession until things came back to somewhere near normal. Who knew that two different types of green could have so widely differing effects on the human palate? After everything came back to normal I had a look at the green paste. It was simple green chili paste--pure and unadulterated. And at that time the chips in my husband’s memory started processing and he remembered that picante meant ‘hot’ and not ‘pickle’!
Photo Link @ flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/santapc/sets/72157605835960902/

{Unfortunately the hard disk in which the video clip of this entire episode was stored crashed beyond retrieval :( }. Here is a view from the eatery.