The Sauces

Again, thanks for your interest! I first started making pepper sauces “way back” in the 1970’s while living in the rural mid-west. Looking back, I have come to realize there were a couple of reasons I started cooking. One reason was winter. Nothing much to do except sledding and playing in the snow. Another reason was abundance of absolutely great produce in the summer and fall.

Most likely my cooking experiments were out of boredom combined with the fact that we had a kitchen with a wood fired grill opposite our fireplace. My mom showed me the ropes and taught me how to cook. She stuck to recipes that were handed down from her mother. I tended to experiment with those. Her recipes are wonderful, from pre depression and all the way through it. (She even had to surrender her pans to the war effort to make weapons.) The recipes, although very good, were conservative and none were spicy. “Spicy” meant adding more black pepper! Being weaned on those meals, I naturally became “jaded” with the flavors.

My mom started me cooking at the age of 8. By the time I was 10, I was allowed to cook on my own. When I was 11, I began to stray from the recipes! I LOVED that “extra black pepper”! I would go to the farm with my mom, and pick out stuff that my mom never used. My mom made a white rice, hamburger stuffed bell pepper dish that I never liked as a child and neither did the dog. One fateful day, I ate a piece of bell pepper raw, THAT’s what they taste like?! I was hooked. I wanted more! You mean there are other kinds peppers too?! WHAT!?

Making a very long story short, my quest was to find and use these wonderful, crunchy pods of goodness in ways not documented in my grandmothers recipes. However, finding a variety of peppers was not as easy as today. I started a very large garden in the rich, black Ohio soil. I made sauces and dishes from a limited selection of fresh peppers right from the local farms too. Literally, you went to the front door of the farmhouse, bought produce that was right out on the porch in baskets. I remember it well and have NEVER found such high quality, wonderfully tasting produce elsewhere. I do miss that but, as with the passing of time, life took over, we moved, parents divorced and years passed. My time was to be dedicated elsewhere. You know, work, kids, work more work and so on. However recently, with the kids all on their own raising our grandkids, necessity and time have once again shifted!

I currently make 5 distinct sauces that my dad would have loved! You will eventually find all the information on them here.

Freeburd, Sweet Jane, Hey Joe, Satisfaction, Let’s Dance and Uriah Heat.

Just visit their pages here to learn more about them.

I also call them my #!Shebang Sauces in my hat tip to the Perl programming language.

I pride myself in growing my own peppers (like the ones you see in the picture above) and I still do, but not enough to make all my sauces. So, the peppers I cannot grow, I buy fresh from the local farmers market. Sometimes I find very unique dried peppers that are great for experimentation.

Below is the Scoville Heat Scale. I will reference this frequently throughout the site.