My Crazy Thoughts
my thoughts on various topics.

The Taste of Paprika
It's really not a big secret that my sister's boyfriend spends a good portion of his time living at our house. It's also not a secret that a good portion of that time he spends bothering me, though I know it is not intentional. Nearly everything that comes out of his mouth is a pretty blatant falsity. I may in the future start a catalog of these interesting tid-bits of wrongness, but for now I'm going to focus on something else entirely.

We keep paprika in our cabinet for one reason--it looks pretty on deviled eggs. I've also used it to pretty up the color on some shrimp that I sauteed with chili powder and cumin. The shrimp was very good, and even better because it was presented with a nice reddish brown coating. Within the last year or so we bought new paprika. Not because we were running out or even half-way through the last bottle. It was because we decided it was probably just a little too old. We bought new. The color is gorgeous.

He puts paprika on everything. Once he put it on ham slices and nuked it in the microwave. If he makes it, it has paprika in it. One day he said something to my sister about having us taste something he had made that was in some way special and made a point to tell us that he had used paprika. I, of course made comment about paprika having not flavor. And he said something like, "I'm Puerto Rican, don't tell me paprika has no flavor." I've tasted paprika before. I tasted the old paprika before we threw it out and the new when we got it. It doesn't really have a taste. I do understand that there are different varieties, and have heard that the Spanish variety has a much more pungent flavor, however, I doubt that comes in the bottle we got at publix. I can't quite understand his obsession with it. Or why he insists on hanging on to the notion that it is the best spice in the entire world and suitable for EVERYTHING. You can even tell that she is humoring him and perhaps hanging on to the idea that he just might be right. We were having squash the other day and she kept putting too much paprika on it because the bottle is difficult to shake, and you could see her look at him in a joking apology, knowing he thought it was too much, but she knew it didn't taste anyway.

There is a country song by Travis Tritt, I think, about a woman standing by her man even when he's wrong. For years I've said that I just couldn't do that. Maybe I wouldn't persecute him for the wrongness, but I wouldn't be able to hold back from telling him he had taken the wrong stand. So I guess my point is, if I couldn't do it for the man I love, I definitely can't stand it from someone else. I'm just not made that way.

The up-side is we'll never have to throw away a mostly full jar of paprika again because we think it might be too old.

posted by Malissa at 11:14 PM