I was perusing Nick’s Hot Sauce Blog yesterday, looking at all the spicy things. I thought to myself, “Dang, I’ll bet I could make my own Hot Sauce.” It sounded easy enough and I knew where to get the peppers, the game was on.

Nick has some recipes in his store, Sweatnspice.com. They looked really really good and I found a few I thought I could throw together easily enough. I called Mama to see if I could use her food processor. Since she hasn’t used it in ages, she said I could ruin it with my chile peppers. Well, okay not so much ruin it. But it’s really tough to get the chile smell/heat out of plastic, so it’s a dedicated machine or nothing. While pondering the recipes for a while, I realized I really wanted a blender. I really really wanted to make my own sauce, not a salsa. I envisioned my bottles on the shelves in grocery stores nationwide. Meathenge’s Hot Sauce, it’ll make your meat sweat! Yeah, anyway. Off to Giovanni’s Produce I went, I needed a bunch of habaneros, jalapenos and I already had a few serranos. Oh, and I needed some white vinegar, I love vinegar.
Now for the recipes … dang … left them at work and I wasn’t able to find them again on Nick’s site. So I googled something up and basically didn’t find anything I liked. Hey, I know how to cook, I know about ingredients, I’ll just wing it, what could possibly go wrong?
I think I used;
3 Habaneros, it may have been 2
2 juicy large Jalapenos
1 Serrano
4 cloves of garlic (too much, use 2)
7 Cherry Tomatoes (just what I had on hand)
1/3 cup White Vinegar
1 tsp kosher salt
and nearly 2 tsps of sugar.
Removing the seeds and veins of the chiles removed most of the heat. I was just playing and really didn’t want to shoot for nuclear sauce tonight. This went fine and I didn’t pick my nose or wipe my eye once!
I decided to try the food processor first, I’ve only used one once or twice before, what the heck eh? I added all the goodies in and whizzed it for quite some time. It still looked like salsa to me. So I decided to open up the inexpensive blender I bought earlier specifically for this occasion.
I remember the afternoon well. I hadn’t been shopping for shiny objects in quite a while, I had a good time. I poopooed all their knives and fry pans, poked fun at the flimsy sauce pans and wondered to myself, “who on earth would buy such a thing?” Running my hands over the Boos cutting boards gave me goose bumps, pop pop pop pop. A clerk asked me if I needed any help, that pretty much snapped me out of my zone and went back to looking at dumb blenders. Found the cheapest one and left with my booty.
Okay, so here we are with my “salsa” needing a decent blending. Nope, said blender arrived with a broken collar, screwey thing that holds in the bottom whirling blades attachment. I reached in my pocket to find the receipt and then remembered that I’d cleaned out my pockets and tossed everything before I left work, sigh. Idiot.
So, this is what I had, pureed salsa.

Oh, it was so good. So awfully good. The sweet habaneros, the green and happy jalapenos and that wonderful whine of the vinegar. And oddly enough the heat wasn’t overwhelming, no really. As you can see, it was so good I warmed up a tamale that a street vendor sold to us at our doorstep the other day. My scalp was sweating and as I walked, could feel the cool air about my head. Yeah, okay so it was a Hot salsa, couldn’t be considered mild. But between the sugar and the vinegar it kept it at bay and I was able to have more. I then realized that Ms. Goofy had been to Lockeford and purchased me a load of fresh sausage! It was time for the basil ones, so I fried them up.

The boys and mama got one sausage and I had the other one. Both the sausage and salsa were world class entries for today’s Meathenge Hot Sauce Adventure #1.
Biggles