HOT SAUCE!

Jeff and I had a lot of fun this last Saturday by finally turning at least some of our frozen hot chile crop from last season into some hot sauce.  We still have a LOT of peppers in the freezer, but we made three kinds of sauce: 1) a Tabasco-style vinegary sauce, 2) a green jalapeno-based Mexican-style sauce, and 3) a tremendous concoction of  roasted habeneros, garlic, onion and these incredible red chiles that we call "mutants."  A few years ago in St. Louis, Jeff grew some chiles in pots on his deck. One of the plants, which we were expecting to bear jalapenos, instead grew this unknown type of fruit which looked to us like a combination of a jalapeno and a cayenne. They ripened to red readily and were delicious. We suspected they were the result of a cross-pollination that we would likely never be able to repeat, so we dried some of the peppers, saved their seeds and successfully grew them again the next year. And so on, for several years now. We grew a fantastic supply of them last summer and fall.

Hot sauce-making was a fun way to pass an afternoon, and we have now broken the ice on the whole process of canning, a thing we had never experimented with before despite our combined  two centuries of kitchen experience.

You might be reading this and thinking, "Chris, this has got frak-all to do with science fiction."  Ah, but it does. Click here to go to Issuu and read a little M-Brane extra, a goofy little short story that I knocked out after the hot sauce project, complete with pictures!

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