As we prepare to report on the fantabulous trip that we had to Las Vegas, enjoy this article from Desicritics.org about one woman’s search to find food that’s spicy enough for her:

The Spice of Life
April 14, 2008
Amodini Sharma

As I travel to India nowadays, I find that I get “softer” with each visit. Food gets to me sooner. I love roadside food, the pani-puri, the chola-bhatura, the aloo-tikki frying tantalizingly in all that glorious oil. It’s hard though to enjoy all that without falling sick at least once – especially with water-based products like pani-puri. Which is quite a bummer because it can be said that I aspire to eat spicy foods. What is food without the spice? What is food which doesn’t fuel the fire in your mouth?

Here in the US, finding spicy food outside the house is a difficult task. You think Thai is spicy, I go Thai. And then when the waitress asks me what spice “number” I want, I go for the max – 5. She halts writing, peers at me, and mouths ungrammatical English, “Are you sure ? 5 very spicy”. Number 5 is not exactly tepid, but it’s not going to blow my socks off either. Still, it’s not a pretty sight; I’m not very girlie in these things. My eyes and my nose water; a tissue remains close at hand. As I spoon the food into my mouth I hardly ever break for water; it dilutes the zest. Needless to say, spicy food is always ingested only in the company of close friends and family; the others somehow don’t seem to appreciate a dripping female in the vicinity.

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