The motivation to start this blog was not only to try new vegetarian dishes, but to expand my cooking repertoire in general. Though I’ve been cooking (mostly poorly) since I was a kid, there’s still many areas where I had yet to venture into… And as a stubborn person who hates being told “you can’t do that,” I’ve been trying things I would normally write off (souffle, nutella, etc.) Today, it was hot sauce, semi-inspired by the amount of tweets I’ve had to read about SXSW this week. Austin was the first place I’d encountered a store dedicated exclusively to hot sauce. Being the indecisive person I am, I walked out without any souvenirs.


Whiskey Hot Sauce (via Georgia Pellegrini)
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar 2 tablespoons chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, roughly chopped ¼ cup Serrano peppers, seeds removed and diced ½ cup carrot, peeled and finely diced ½ cup onion, finely diced 1/4 cup whiskey Juice of 1 lemon ½ cup brown sugar or molasses ¼ teaspoon ground cumin 1 tablespoon salt
In a saucepan, heat the vinegar with 1 cup of water and add the diced peppers, Chipotle peppers, onion, and carrot. Let them simmer on low heat covered for 15-20 minutes to soften.Add the remaining ingredients to the saucepan, stir and return to a simmer for 3-5 minutes.
Puree in a blender or food processor, transfer to a glass jar and let cool. Store in the refrigerator for up to one year.
I used 1/2 cup of Serrano pepper instead of a 1/4 cup, 2 tbls of honey (too much) and 1/4 a tsp of cayenne pepper. This recipe is fairly sweet, so the cayenne was a needed bite…The overall taste experience was “sweet, sorta smokey-spicy/sweet-spicy-OOO-SPICY.” Also, I used a hand blender to grind everything to death, and then put it through a strainer (hence the first picture) to get any seeds out.
Nika was kind enough to be a taste tester and helped me dig through the first container of sauce (armed with some panfried breadcrumb tofu.) This recipes makes about 1 1/2 cups of hot sauce.
Outside of cooking, here’s some interesting things from this week…