I’ve got bad hands.  Well, actually, I have sensitive skin.  But I like my peppers – serrano and jalapeño being my favorites.  I don’t like to wear gloves, so my strategy is to cut peppers quickly and without having to have my hands on them for very long. I thought I’d show you how I handle peppers to get most of the meat and save my hands, too.

1.  This is the way I use most often. (See above)  Slice the pepper (in this case, a jalapeño) from stem end to tip end, just outside of the seed core.  Rotate a quarter turn, and slice again. Rotate again, slice again.  And one more time.  You’ll have four slices and a separate core with the seeds in no time.

2.  This is my alternate method. Cut off the stem and the tip.  Slice from top to bottom on one side, then take your knife and slice where the seed core is attached to the meat.  Easy, squeezy.

If you go to a bar or restaurant here and order a beer, they’ll usually bring you a dish of limes and sea salt at the same time. Por supuesto! (But if they don’t be sure to ask!) We dip the lime in the salt and scrunch it onto the top of the bottle, getting the limey goodness on the bottle and into the beer, too.

If you’ve enjoyed those lovely limey beers, you probably never even thought of how to cut a lime to make best use of it and have few seeds, have you?  Here you go… Sinaloa style lime slicing!

3.  Take a lime, and slice a round off one side, not touching the seeds in the center.  Do the same off the other side.  You have two nice rounds… see picture below.

4.  Then cut two partial bits off the remaining part.  See how the seeds all remain in the core, not squeezed into your drink?  Toss the core, and you have four nice pieces and no seeds.  Repeat until you have a nice plateful!

Make sure you wash the lime juice off your hands before you expose them to the sun – I have heard stories of people with strange burn/rashes from the combination of sun and lime juice.  But don’t let my warning scare you off from squeezing lime into your beer while relaxing on the beach… just rubbing the lime off with some sand or rinsing your hands in the ocean will do!  And now, a toast!

¡Arriba, abajo, al centro, adentro! (Visit the link if you need an explanation…)