why we are the way we are

Adventures in Hot Pepper Sauce

Two eight ounce swing top bottles and one two ounce swing top jar sitting on a kitchen table. The vessels are filled with hot pepper sauce.

Let me warn you now: this recipe will produce an extremely hot sauce, and the objective will be to make the flavour of the peppers the star of the show.

Another warning: as you prepare the sauce, you’ll almost certainly notice that the fumes are strong and irritating. I always prepare mine outside. If you can’t do that, make sure that you cook on the back burner to give your fume hood exhaust a fighting chance.

And now a suggestion: Latex gloves will be your friends as you chop your peppers. I promise you that the LAST thing you want to do is to find out the hard way that you’ve still got hot pepper residue on your fingers.

Also, there’s this: I have a separate set of prep tools for pepper sauce. What I said about pepper residue on your fingers goes just the same for pepper residue on utensils and cooking equipment. No matter how well you clean that blender, there’s always a possibility that you’ll wind up with a spicy milk shake the next time you use it. No-one ever really wants a spicy milk shake, no matter what they tell you.

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April 2012 | Father Figure

Originally written on April 6th, 2012

My first memory of my father is of fear.  That’s not something most people say of parents, especially of fathers.  A father is meant to be a protector; to be strong.  He’s meant to be a foundation on which can stand the edifice of the family.  It’s unfair to say that my father was not these things, because in a very real way, he was every one of those and more.  I was two years old when he left us, and it was maybe the hardest thing that he could have done.  At the time, we lived in South America, and he had moved to Canada alone to establish a home for us.  He wanted better opportunities for me and for my sister than could have been found where we lived.  So it amounts to this: he gave up his family for his family.

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