For the fifth straight year, October is Dining Month on OnMilwaukee.com, presented by Concordia University. All month, we're stuffed with restaurant reviews, delectable features, chef profiles and unique articles on everything food, as well as the winners of our "Best of Dining 2011."
For years of my life, I didn't care much for hot food. I ordered everything, including Thai food, mild to medium. But over time, I started to appreciate hot food until I reached where I am today: just a spark away from full-fledged fire eating.
I now go through about a bottle of Sriracha a month. I put it on everything, and pick recipes or food items based on whether or not they're a good vehicle for hot sauce. I have found corn-on-the-cob, enchiladas, matzoh ball soup, Tater Tots and cottage cheese to be some of the best complements for Sriracha. (Tabasco, for the record, is not hot sauce. It is pepper sauce.)
I also love to eat really hot food when I'm out. Milwaukee has some restaurants with very hot dishes – the King & I and Thai Bar-B-Q immediately come to mind – but a Thai restaurant in St. Paul, Minn., is the only eatery, so far, to make a dish that was too scorching for me.
I took one bite, me eyes pooled with tears of joy and fear, ate another and felt like my head might pop off and then somehow got a little splash of the sauce in my eye. I thought my eyeball was melting and I was going to have to fork over my driver's license before dessert.
Maybe it was payback after ordering so menu entrees at the top of the heat scale and smugly believing that no one was able to make a dish to challenge my seemingly-impervious-to-heat mouth.
I have, indeed, eaten some very hot dishes in Milwaukee restaurants, but I am always looking for new ones that will rival that Near Death Experience I had in the Twin Cities. Know of a particular entree that might blast steam from my ears and sound a train whistle after a single bite? Bring it.
Molly Snyder started writing and publishing her work at the age 10, when her community newspaper printed her poem, "The Unicorn.” Since then, she's expanded beyond the subject of mythical creatures and written in many different mediums but, nearest and dearest to her heart, thousands of articles for OnMilwaukee.
Molly is a regular contributor to FOX6 News and numerous radio stations as well as the co-host of "Dandelions: A Podcast For Women.” She's received five Milwaukee Press Club Awards, served as the Pfister Narrator and is the Wisconsin State Fair’s Celebrity Cream Puff Eating Champion of 2019.
