hurts so good/Mister saves the day

I truly don't know how these things happen.  I thought I was finally finished my food shopping when I walked out of Trader Joe's this evening, only to get home and start making Granada Paella from The Urban Vegan and discover that I was short a red bell pepper.  I don't know how many times Mister has gone out after I started making dinner to get something I was missing (tortilla chips, refried beans, spinach, to name a few) but we can add Red Bell Pepper to the list.

He came back with a brown paper bag and my spidey-sense* told me the red pepper was not alone.  Indeed, after Mister pulled out the pepper, he smiled and reached back into the bag and gave me chocolate, "because you ran out."  What a sweetheart! because I did eat my last mini-chocolate bar from the halloween candy last night.  I thought it was sweet that he wanted to be as vigilant about my dark chocolate supply as I am about his bread supply.
*spidey-sense: the magical ability of wives to know beyond any shadow of doubt that their husbands will return home with at least 1 item more than they were sent out to get.  I inherited mine from my mother and that's why my dad isn't allowed to go to Pepperidge Farm unchaperoned.

Anyway, I recognized that Mister was probably about to be even more helpful as I was cooking dinner.

I love this recipe - truly I do - but I keep forgetting how now that I make it correctly, it burns my face off.  This is normally how dinner goes when I make this:
Bite 1: mmmm....tasty, but hey, that's a little spicy!
Bite 2: umm.....
Bite 3: chokecough
water break
get a few more bites in: face starts to feel a little hot around the ears, eyes, and nose
water break
few more bites: nose starts running
wipe nose
water break
few more bites: now my tongue and lips are burning at a steady rate, almost ignorable
few more bites: can't quite feel my tongue
Time for 2nds! (can't help it - it tastes so good it's worth the pain)
grand finale: my nose is red, my ears are red, my nose is sniffly, my lips are burning and my tongue is nearly numb... and my husband, who by now has plowed through three bowls without blinking or taking more than two sips of water, is laughing at me.

As I've learned previously, the best way to treat these "symptoms" is with dark chocolate.

Thank you, Mister

Although Angst initially showed some interest in dinner, it didn't take long for him to decide he wasn't terribly interested in whatever was making his Lady disintegrate, so he found something else to be far more interesting than our dinner time talk about dubstep. [By the way - if you want to see something incredible, click here and prepare to hold your breath for about 6 minutes.]

Inside that large Williams-Sonoma bag live some other, smaller paper bags.  Just before we sat down, Mister added the little brown sack from Essene to that bag, but Angst really wanted it.  This is the last in a series of pictures of him climbing into the larger bag to snuffle at and try to retrieve "his" bag.

my bag.  mine.