Brought to you by the folks over at the Hot Sauce Blog, please check out the Step Up for Charity Reserves listing that Nick posted a few days ago. Having just finished our own charity project not too long ago, we realize how important it is for the chilehead community to lend their support to charitable causes.

Jim Campbell, who is a firefighter, hot sauce maker, chile pepper grower extraordinaire, and friend to us here at the HZOB, will be attempting to break the worlds’ record for climbing stairs in one 24-hour period by exceeding those totals, all to raise money for several charities that are especially close to him. For more details about his cause, please see his site at:

Step up for Charity

To contribute, you can bid on a few different collectible sauce sets on eBay. The ones available will be limited editions (#1-5) of bottles signed exclusively by CaJohn and Blair. (If they weren’t going to sell for a bazillion dollars more than we could spend, we’d bid on them ourselves!) By winning one of these auctions, you would not only make your collection one of the coolest around, you would also be supporting some truly worthwhile causes. Set #3 is up for sale now, and we will try to post when the others go up for sale to make sure all our readers have a chance to see it as well.

Good luck, Jim!

A great many chileheads out there are subscribers to Chile Pepper magazine. We have been for many years, having issues that go back 10 years or more. In fact, we now have so many issues at home in our collection that we can’t reasonably stack them up anymore without them tipping to one side and nearly falling over. We’ve started sealing them up in those plastic magazine protector bags just to keep them from getting easily scuffed, torn, or otherwise damaged. Some people do this for their comic books, Playboy magazines, or whatever magazines that they collect…but I digress.

We have just found out that Chile Pepper magazine was sold. Again. It was sold by Avenue Communications L.L.C. in 2004 to Lifestyle Media, who also publishes 17 enthusiast magazines, including Pilates Style and flagship publication American Cheerleader. Apparently, it’s had a few owners since its inception in 1987. It’s this fact which is particularly curious. Is it not profitable enough? Is it too high-maintenance of a publication? What’s the deal?

Anyhow, Chile Pepper’s been sold again. Someone told me to whom but I’m blanking on the name of what company purchased it this time. Anybody out there know? This change of ownership probably doesn’t mean anything for the average reader…a change of editor, perhaps a graphics change or change in look, maybe something else. It does come at a bit of a dubious time, however. They just re-tooled their website for ZestFest 2006 and should be in the heat of making their preparation for their huge annual industry show out in Ft. Worth, TX. It seemed a little odd that for all the work they did making the site look different, that the content was not noticeably changed. A conspiracy theorist, I’m not…but this all seems a bit off-kilter to me.

I have no doubt that there are industry people out there who know something about this whole deal. If so, then fess up? Emails to Chile Pepper by us (mostly about ZestFest) have gone unanswered for 2-3 weeks now and the folks at Lifestyle Media can be notoriously difficult to reach by phone. We’d love to hear what anyone else has to say about all this. Thanks in advance!

By the way, the pictures are taken of our own magazines down in our humble “Hot Sauce Shrine” area of our basement.

Within minutes, beads of sweat began to gather on Ken Harris’ face just as he finished a habanero burger — boasted as the world’s hottest burger.

Now with this introduction, this sounds like it should be starring one of us in the role of suffering hero due to self-inflicted habanero hell.

For more about this restaurant called the Prince of Wales Pub, check out this article from the San Mateo Daily Journal:

Holy habanero!

Joe has dared several hot & spicy eating challenges where the victorious survivor would get a chance to painfully scrawl his/her name on a “Wall of Flame” to declare that you were stupid/brave/insane/misguided/uninformed enough to embark on a gustatory challenge that would push the limits of your taste buds to endure.

If we’re ever in the SF area (and it just might happen), it’s pretty likely that we’ll find our way to San Mateo to try these out. All we’ll need after that is a kamikaze headband, a bottle of Pepcid, and a large pitcher of beer….

We love it to see one of our HZOB faves continue to have success, particularly with media coverage. Check this new article out about Uncle Brutha:

Get fresh with hot sauce guru Uncle Brutha

In the article, Brennan hints at some new ideas he has for some upcoming sauces. Can’t wait to try them once they’re on the market!

Joe’s been friends with Jed for a long time. Seen in the pic here, Jed (a.k.a. John McClure) was indeed one of Joe’s first friends he made in Lexington during his long-ago move from New Orleans, LA to Lexington, KY. As a friend, former roommate, and fellow Miskatonic Student Union alumnus, we shared a lot of common interests. Although we don’t live anywhere close to each other anymore, Jed lets us know how he’s doing from time to time up in the concrete jungle of NYC.

Some time ago, Jed wrote to tell us that his father made his own hot sauce and wanted us to try some of it. With little hesitation, we gladly accepted his offer. Jack McClure (a.k.a. Captain Jack) had this to say about his sauce creations:

» Continue Reading

Hello! Chili-Head Jonathan Passow officially reporting in for The Hot Zone Online Blog! I’m the newest reviewer for Joe and Linda’s little blog, which I felt honored that they asked me to do reviews for them. So let me tell you a little bit about myself, since I was told that an introduction was necessary.

I was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio and at the ripe old age of 20, I moved out to my current local in Hollywood, CA. I am a quasi-famous actor, having had parts in Starship Troopers 2, Pirates of the Caribbean, AMC’s Movies at our House, Boston Public and many more flicks.

My love for hot products started in 2005 when Dave Reed (my roommate) and I started a garden. He loves the heat, so I was talked into putting in a bunch of peppers. After trying a few homegrown serranos, I was instantly hooked. This year’s garden includes 172 pepper plants out of 13 varieties and the peppers will be used for my own sauces, butters, jell-o, and other products.

I now am an avid chili eater and love anything hot. So much so, that if it’s not hot…I will make it hot. If i’m going out to eat, I bring my own hot sauces and dry powders because the standard Tabasco sauces just don’t cut it for me anymore.

Now that that is over, let the reviews begin! Viva la Mullet! Oh! I almost forgot…you can visit my site at www.mulletman.org and if anyone wishes to send me sample hot sauces to review, just be sure to contact Joe and Linda and they will forward you my address.

This past Saturday at our very own North Market, we attended the Grillmasters Festival for 2006. It was billed as the North Market’s “first of its annual summer food festivals with a tribute to backyard cooking enthusiasts.” Now we do passably well grilling out on our own gas grill, but the thought of tasting the delicately grilled creations of those more gifted with a grill than us was enough to lure us down there for a couple of hours. One of the celebrity chefs was going to be CaJohn, so we also didn’t want to miss him wowing the crowds with his yummy recipes. So…loading up our temperamental toddlers, we headed to downtown Columbus in search of the Grillmasters!

» Continue Reading

For several weeks, we have toyed with the idea of growing a couple of pepper plants this year. In previous years, we have ordered pepper plants from both Cross Country Nurseries and the Chile Woman, but didn’t need a total of 6 plants this year…which is the minimum you can order through either one of those sources. Since we don’t currently have any garden space to use, we have only containers in which to use for any peppers we might grow. We found a couple of chile plants this past weekend, and brought them home to give it the ol’ college try to get them to make peppers this year. In homage to ancient history, we have:

» Continue Reading

As of this past Friday, June 16, our Hot Rock for Autism charity project came to a close for 2006. Regardless of any goals we set for ourselves, this event was a rousing success. Through our eBay auctions and through private donations, we raised

$656

for the Autism Society of America. We should recognize those who supported us and this project and made it possible for this to happen…

To our benefactors who donated personalized/autographed bottles of hot sauce to auction on eBay:

Michael Anthony and the folks at the Mad Anthony Cafe
Bill Wharton, of Sauce Boss fame, and his lovely wife Ruth

Thanks to these people for their private donations:

Blair from Extremefood.com
Pam from Longbranch Trading Co.
M. from Daily Kvetch
Friends Ari & Jill from Baltimore, MD
Friends Felissa & Neil from Lexington, KY
Friend Rhonda from Dallas, TX

Lastly, thanks to those sites/blogs who kept our story and site link up for their readers to see:

Hot Sauce Blog
Knockin’ On The Golden Door
The Hampton Smoker
The Spice Must Flow
TheHotPepper.com

We plan to start a new charity project in 2007 for Autism Awareness month, so we have nearly a whole year to plan out how we can again merge spciy food, hot sauce, and autism into a fantastic fundraising effort. Stay tuned!

We don’t kow them all that well, but we like ‘em well enough to send out some well-deserved kudos to the ladies of Three Hot Tamales who had this great online article from the NorthJersey.com site:

Award-winning Three Hot Tamales hot sauces got start in Garfield kitchen

We are definitely looking forward to trying their products at some point…perhaps in picking up a few bottles when we go to ZestFest in September.

Way to go, ladies!

This site is a member of The Ring Of Fire - a linked list of Chile websites
Next | Skip Next | Next 5 | Prev | Skip Prev | Random Site

Join the ring or browse a complete list of The Ring of Fire Members
If you discover problems with any of The Ring Of Fire site
please notify the RingMaster