Louisiana Fire

As my travels have brought me to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I found it necessary to make the trek to some of the food utopias that the city has to offer. I could have gone looking for any of the average (or less than average) tasting cheese steak joints, depending on your own opinion. Though I have been to a few of them, they seem to leave me wanting something more, so I decided this time that I would let myself follow the path less traveled.



So I walked and walked through center city to see what I could see and heading along Market Street and then Arch Street, I came across a place I had heard of a few times in passing but was never able to visit, until now. I had reached my destination, Reading Terminal Market. Inside, dozens of merchants, selling any type of food you could ever dream up and wish for.



It should be obvious by now that I had a particular type of food in mind, and I knew just where to get it. I headed directly for Beck's Cajun Cafe, located down one of the main avenues of the market, adjacent to DiNic's Roast Pork.



Becks offers up some of the best Cajun food I have ever tasted, and believe me, if I come across it while I am out at a restaurant, I will drop everything and try it. As the place had just opened (the Market that is, which opens at 8 am), there was not a lot of food out and ready to serve. The Jambalaya was on but wouldn't be ready until 9, and I was getting impatient. I could smell Creole spices all around me as I sat at the counter. I had to have something, so I ordered up a bowl of their fresh Chicken and Andouille gumbo. It was perfect. Hot and spicy, served over rice which only held in the heat and texture. Delicious in every way. The server and the chef at Becks couldn't have been nicer to me either. The chef joked as he cooked and the server gave me a free (giant) piece of fresh cornbread to go with the gumbo, and it mixed perfectly together.



If you are ever in Philly, and find yourself around Center City, specifically around 12th and Arch streets, then mosey on over to Reading Terminal Market and hit up Becks. I promise you, with all of my blogger-credibility, that you will not be disappointed. You might sweat a bit when you're chowing down on their food, but you will love the spice and if you can handle it, the slow burning heat of their delicious Cajun food.

Slow Burn, Good Eats

Several of my friends like to frequent the new (-ish) bar in town, Millers' Langhorne Ale House:



and I usually try to go with them. They have pretty good food and the drinks are cheap (relatively). But one thing which stands out above the rest, for me at least, is their hot wings. They make them well and most importantly, they make them HOT. Or at least, they try to. As with any spicy food, it really depends on who makes the sauce for these wings that makes all the difference concerning whether they are good or not. The hottest wings served at this particular establishment are the Mt. Saint Helens Wings.



The wings are great with this sauce. It is the hottest sauce the place offers, but the wings just aren't the same without it. It gives them just enough kick that you're sweating a little while eating them, but not so much that it melts your face and you can't eat anything for the rest of the month. They also go great with beer, almost any beer for that matter (REAL beer, not your run-of-the-mill crap like Lionshead and Natural Ice, I'm talking real beer that isn't brewed in a piss-filled sewer).



On the heat-scale, I wouldn't think that these wings would rate very high, hotter than the average sonora pepper, if I had to guess I would think that they added some jalapenos to the sauce to give it some spice, but I doubt that they use anything hotter than that. However, regardless of heat intensity, it is still there and works for the wings. I would highly recommend this spicy dish to anyone who wants to feel a little burn.

The Spicy World We Live In

This blog was spawned with the purpose of eating in mind, specifically eating things that are Spicy (hence the name). In this delicious pursuit of all things spicy, it will be my goal to track down all sorts of spicy dishes and eat them, working my way up the "spice-ladder," the eventual goal being to come face to face with - and conquer - the hottest pepper in the world: The Ghost Chili.



Intimidating looking, no? But that's the fun in it. We can start off scaring everyone with how utterly bad-ass that pepper looks, and then move along to something a little more manageable, for now. For the first post, my (currently nonexistent audience) will require a history lesson on spice and the "Scoville Heat Scale". In 1912, Chemist William Scoville developed a revolutionary method that could be used to measure the heat of chili peppers. This scale measures the heat intensity of peppers, from the bell pepper:



- A cute and sweet pepper with a Scoville Unit rating of zero - to the Naga Jolokia (The Ghost Chili) that has a rating of over ONE MILLION SCOVILLE (Holy Crap!). So there it is, with my mission laid out before me and a constant urge to find the next delicious spicy dish, I begin my quest to find the best hot food available, and to conquer that scary ass ghost chili.