Jack and I love spicy food. Chilies or hot sauce go in all my dishes. Jack grew up with it and I developed a taste for spicy in my 20’s.

I most often work with fresh chilies or bottled hot sauce. But this Pozole recipe, a mixture of meat and hominy, called for dried chilies. An opened almost full package of dried chilies lay in my cupboard, tiny little ones called Pequin, not the larger ones the recipe called for.

Always the one for substituting, I used the tiny Pequins. Hey, why buy more stuff when the package is open in your cupboard. I dumped the chilies in the pot along with some fresh jalapenos and set it to boil.

Within minutes, my throat constricted. I sneezed violently several times. I turned off the heat so chilies soaked in the hot water and covered the pot. Jack, sitt...

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