The worst cookies in the world

the worst cookies in the world, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

I made another round of hot sauce for the holidays. What? Everybody else is making cookies, well I don't particularly LIKE cookies. I don't like the mess, I don't like having to mete them out to my children like some jailer with a pack of cigarettes, and I really don't like that whole 8 minutes in the oven or else they burn and stink up the house and make the children cry thing.

I just don't like being told what to do, even by an oven timer.

Ok, so I see your point, that's idiotic. Well, anyway, if you are a lucky friend or relative of mine, or if you're the type to hand out baggies of cookies this time of year, you may get handed a bottle of fire. This time I used my old recipe: drown the chilis in white vinegar til you're ready to cook, blend the chilis and vinegar with a mango or something, force thru a strainer to get the seeds out, cook til the vinegar taste is mostly gone, fix the consistency with alcohol and/or water, et voilà.

But I was looking at the skin-and-seeds pulp that was left over after I strained the paste. "That's a lot of hot right there," I thought to myself.

So I spread the stuff on a piece of foil and stuck it in the oven on a cookie sheet (see, they come in handy even in my house) at 250 degrees for a couple hours. Dried it right up til it was crunchy-looking.

While it was cooling on the stove top, our friend Sam came to collect his daughter. "What's this?" he said, and picked up a large flake and brought it to his face. "NO! AAA! DON'T EAT THAT!" I hollered. "PUT IT DOWN!"

I think I kind of offended him. In retrospect, he probably was just going to give it a sniff. But I have seen that man eat a pickled plum from my fridge the size and color of a baby's testicle, and then pretend that it was fit to eat until he conned someone else into trying one (poor Constance). So I wasn't taking any chances. I think if you ate a mouthful of this stuff you would end up in the 'mergency room.

Eventually I peeled the stuff off the foil and mashed it up in a mortar, and now we have a big jar of extremely potent homemade chili flakes to shake onto our pizza. If we want to die.