The vast majority of my heritage lies in the peoples of Western Europe.

Much like my red hair belies, I do indeed have Irish and Scottish ancestry.

I also have some combination of German, Dutch and Cherokee Indian.

This heritage had given me characteristic traits such as an inability to tan and a decently thick beard, but it also affected things like my taste buds.

I grew up with a dislike of spicy foods. My stepdad, who is much the same around spicy foods, says he does not like anything hotter than ketchup.

I used to be the exact same way. That is, right up until a few years ago.

I was eating eggs in the dining hall at UNA for the umpteenth time during my two-year stay at the university.

The staff had just recently purchased several bottles of sriracha sauce, a type of hot sauce that originates from Thailand.

The inventor of the concoction set out to make a spicy sauce that he hoped would become the ketchup of the Asian world.

I put the sauce on my eggs in an attempt to liven up the meal, and I found that the sauce tasted good in spite of the added chemical heat.

That started me on a long, yet surprisingly short, foray into trying out increasingly spicier foods.

I say this because the exploration phase of my foray soon led me to the realization that not only could I stomach spicy food, I actually enjoyed it.

Fast forward two years and I regularly put hot sauce on the foods that I eat.

If you were to go back in time and tell myself and my parents that I would one day enjoy spicy foods, they would be sure to incur as to why you wasted your amazing ability in order to get a somewhat humorous response from a trivial statement. We would all be surprised though.

I started with milder sauces made from jalapeno and the like.

I quickly graduated to hot sauce made from red peppers, then onto cayenne pepper sauces, which I really like.

I received a couple of hot sauces as a gift one time, with one made from orange habanero peppers.

I got used to this sauce as well, so now most things do not seem that spicy to me. I will graduate to hot sauce made from red savina habaneros ay some point, but that’s a future endeavor.

The moral of the story is to not be afraid to try new things because you just might enjoy them.

I now have a collection of glass bottles representing each different hot sauce I have tried. It’s a small collection now, but it will grow with time.