Yeah, you!

Been thinking about ordering Dr. Antoniades’ Book, The Hot Sauce Diet? Been thinking that maybe this might be the way to go? Have you also been thinking that maybe you might want to order those Peppermaster Hot Sauces that you keep reading about (and I keep talking about?) but haven’t yet taken the plunge?

Would you like to take a chance at eliminating that extra 10 lbs of unsightly middle age hanging around your belly button and get some free Hot Sauce while you’re about it? Can you put a couple of sentences together once a week to talk about your experience? Do you think you might want to get rid of it in time for that Fourth of July pool party? Do you think it might be fun to try?

Well, then read on!

I first heard of Dr. Spiro Antoniades when I learned that he had actually acted upon our idea to create a hot sauce diet and indeed had succeeded with one.

Obviously, he had a similar idea, because before we could act on our idea, his new best seller was released. It has been getting a lot of interest and discussion amongst chiliheads and several someones suggested that perhaps we ought to do this. So, an idea was born and several long-winded conversations and a few jars of hot sauce later, we came up with a plan: The Hot Sauce Diet Contest.

Brooks Pepperfire Foods Inc. and Dr. Spiro Antoniades will be teaming up to present the first competition of its kind and we’d like you to participate.

We are of course asking for volunteers for the project and in return participants will receive a stock of Peppermaster Hot Sauces and a copy of Dr. Antoniades’ book. You’ll have to act fast, though, because we will only be selecting 10 participants and intend to select from the volunteers on the basis of age, gender, and geographic location, so that we can get as wide a selection of results as possible given the small number of participants.

The project will cover a period of ten weeks and each participant will have an extra inch or so and each participant will be given ten sauces: ten weeks, ten hot sauces. Each selected participant will be asked to provide the following demographics prior to the study: age, height, current Body Mass Index, occupation, and completion of an SF-36 health assessment questionnaire. For those of you unfamiliar with the SF-36 questionnaire it is simply an assessment of general health. You will also be asked to sign a disclaimer taking full responsibility for your participation in the competition, for obvious reasons and you will be asked to provide an unretouched photograph (you can cover your eyes) of yourself, both before and after.

Each participant will follow the program to the letter, using Peppermaster sauces, exclusively. You will be asked to read Dr. Antoniades’ book and complete the checklist at the end of the book. And you must read it, we’ll be expecting at least an 85% correct score on an open book test on the details of the program, so no cheating!

Dr. Antoniades will be volunteering his time as medical advisor on the project and each participant will be expected to meet with Dr. Antoniades, by telephone, each week.

And finally, each participant will keep a log/blog of their experiences. THIS IS MANDATORY. The blog can be written, webcam video, or audio in a minimum of once weekly contributions. The blog should be written in the first person, meaning “I did this today” style and should consist of physical experiences and psychological changes, feelings, etc. If something humourous happens, all the better.

Our Blogmaster for the project will be the brilliant and beautiful Yara Nielsenshultz of Red Pepper Writing.

With an extensive history as a professional writer and teacher and a blog-writer with real flair, not to mention a really fitting corporate name, Yara will take care of your blog entries; ensuring they read the way you mean them to and making sure our non-writer participants look as good as those who just happen to be real wordsmiths. So, don’t feel uncomfortable joining if you don’t have a flair for verbage. The project is meant to be fun and we brought Yara on board so that this aspect of the project wouldn’t be a deterrent to you!

If I haven’t yet convinced you to sign up, perhaps these words will inspire you:

“Before this I was deeply ashamed of my own body. I was a glutton. Although my life was happy and fulfilled, every time I looked in the mirror I knew my external shape wasn’t the real me. It had taken me years of ignoring my health to pack on the pounds, but just one year of serious commitment to undo the damage.” — Dr. Spiro Antoniades

We can’t promise you what will happen to your frame, but you’ll get a great book and some great hot sauce get a leap frog start on where you want to go and you’ll have a whole lot of fun doing it. Yeah, I know it sounds a little kitsch! So what? Get on the bandwagon!

If you are interested in participating, please send an email to Tina Brooks with “Hot Sauce Diet” in the reference line. And do it quick! There are only 4 spots left!

Coming on the heels of Passow’s last review of the Mangonesian Chipotle sauce, it’s a bit ironic that my next review that was waiting in the wings was also a Tahiti Joe hot sauce. This one, the Hot Ass Devil Juice XX Hot Sauce, seemed to be a hot sauce that was either going to fall into the gimmick category and be tossed onto that pile for good, or would be the conversation-piece sauce for me for the next month.

I was hoping for the latter.

As has been my modus operandi of late, this has been one of the handful of sauces which I’ve carried around with me pretty much everywhere for the past few weeks. Actually, I’ve been a walking Tahiti Joe catalog lately, since I’ve been trying lots of his stuff…but I digress. With a big red demon on the bottle and the emblazoned words “Hot Ass” on it, I just had to make sure that this sauce was prominently displayed on the table whenever I ate.

My experience with the Tahiti Joe hot sauces has been uniformly good thus far, particularly from my last review, but some weird déjà vu hit me when I looked at the list of ingredients from this sauce:
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So, how did you spend your Memorial Day? If like us, you decided to exercise your grill and BBQ up some charred meat, then you are in a select company of a few million Americans who likely did so this year. But, did you get your spicy mustard mojo on?? After grilling up some great oversized kosher hot dogs, we went hunting for just the right taste to accentuate the meal just perfectly.

The answer? CaJohn’s Dog-On Good Mustard.

It’s been a little while since we did the review, and fortunately we still had an extra bottle laying around just waiting to be used. If you haven’t read the review or tried the mustard for yourself, you’re just plain missing out. If it wasn’t redundant, we’d review it again now!

Hope your Memorial Day was restful! Bon appetit!

With Joe and Linda posting pictures of their great looking pepper plants for this season, I felt it was time to show off some of my beauties. My roommate and good friend, Dave Reed started growing pepper plants about 3 years ago (along with many a vegetable) and this will be our fourth year. Last year we grew 173 pepper plants out of 13 different varieties and this year we will be doing (at last count) 213 pepper plants out of 25 different varieties. Here’s the list:

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This looked like an interesting article from PRWEB, so perhaps anyone who’s tried these sauces might chime in with a comment. It looks like swanky enough label art and marketing, but can the sauces be any good? Perhaps we’ll get some and taste them for ourselves and find out. For now, here’s the info:

Fire Brand Grilling Sauces Launches Firebrandsauce.com for Boldness in BBQ

Freedom Grill, Inc. announces the launch of firebrandsauce.com to promote their new line of award winning Fire Brand Grilling Sauces, the natural extension of the Freedom Grill tailgating gurus’ never-ending quest for better barbecue. Firebrandsauce.com offers Fire Brand Original Habanero Hot Sauce, Fire Brand Hickory-Molasses Bar-B-Q Sauce, Fire Brand Original Steak Sauce, and Fire Brand Spicy Habanero Hot Mustard.

San Diego, CA (PRWEB) May 27, 2007 — Freedom Grill, Inc. announces the launch of firebrandsauce.com to promote their new line of award winning Fire Brand Grilling Sauces. Fire Brand Grilling Sauces are the natural extension of the Freedom Grill tailgating gurus’ never-ending quest for better barbecue. Thousands of barbecue sauce recipes were tasted in the search for the perfect combination of ingredients to call Fire Brand. Firebrandsauce.com was developed to showcase the bold character of these delicious barbecue condiments.

Each of the four Original Fire Brand Sauces is handcrafted in small batches in El Cajon, California using only the freshest individually selected ingredients available and no preservatives. The microbatch process creates the boldest, richest barbecue sauces you’ll find anywhere. When you’re looking for barbecue condiments, sauce, or seasonings firebrandsauce.com is your one stop shop. The only thing you won’t find at Fire Brand is wimpy, runny, watered-down sauces with no flavor. Fire Brand Sauces are bold, thick, and rich and every one of them has enough kick to let your taste buds know you’re alive.

Firebrandsauce.com offers Fire Brand Original Habanero Hot Sauce, Fire Brand Hickory-Molasses Bar-B-Q Sauce, Fire Brand Original Steak Sauce, and Fire Brand Spicy Habanero Hot Mustard. The steak sauce, mustard sauce, and bar-b-q sauce all received top honors at the National Barbecue Association’s Awards of Excellence in 2007. The web site provides consumers with insight into what makes each sauce special along with grilling tips, links, and plenty of recipes for creating spectacular barbecue fare with Fire Brand Sauces. From the flavors to the design of the labels Fire Brand Sauces are bold and robust. Freedom Grill worked with MC Media to create a site that is engaging, informative and projects the spirit of boldness that true grillers bring to every event. “We knew what we wanted and MC Media made it happen. Firebrandsauce.com is a great site and the only thing better is to actually taste the sauces,” stated Freedom Grill VP of Marketing, Steve Glor. “When consumers see this site, taste the sauces, and try the grilling recipes, I have no doubt they’ll tell their friends and order more.”

About Freedom Grill
Freedom Grill, Inc. designs and markets innovative products and accessories for the tailgating, camping and outdoor activities markets. Headquartered in Poway, California, the company markets easily transportable, high-performance gas grills and accessories designed for the Extreme Tailgating crowd. Freedom Grill products are sold through specialty BBQ retailers, sporting goods stores, and hardware stores. For more information visit www.freedomgrill.com.

I got a package from Tahiti Joe’s Hot Sauces a little bit ago of his whole line and one of those bottles is Maui Pepper Co. Mangonesian Chipotle. After much testing to find the right kind of food for this unique sauce, the results are in.

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We seldom post restaurant reviews on places where we’ve not yet eaten, but this one caught our eye. Besides being chicken wing aficionados ourselves (and have struggled to find good ones locally), we just love what this author from the Memphis Commercial Appeal had to say about this wing eatery known as The Wing Factory. If anyone’s ever tried it, let us know if you agree with this review:

Some mighty fine chicken wings

Nice little shop on Park does something special with humble fare
May 25, 2007

A chicken wing is a humble object, not much use to the chicken, much less human beings. When I was a tot, my older brother used to pass off the chicken wing as another leg: “See, you can have a chicken ‘leg’ too, just like me and Dad.” Yeah, right, and years of therapy ensue.

All that changed in the far-off year 1964, when Teressa Bellissimo, at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, N.Y, little knowing what she wrought, took an order of deep-fried chicken wings and served them with bleu cheese dressing and celery sticks. Before too long, “Buffalo Wings” could be found in every bar from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, and from Coeur d’Alene to Corpus Christi. Seldom called “Buffalo” anymore, chicken wings are as ubiquitous a part of contemporary American gastronomy as soy lattes and taco salads.

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Well, it took some creative time-management in the middle of my busy work week, but I was able to finish transplanting the rest of our assortment of chile pepper plants. As you can see above from the close-up view of the Jamaican Hot Pepper plant, a Capsicum chinense related to the habanero, these plants are pretty healthy and vigorous. This pic was taken the day after transplant, and no sign of wilting thus far.
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Just recently, we’ve received a couple of emails from people about how to assess the heat level of food in regards to spiciness. You don’t have to be a food scientist to understand it anymore, so here’s an excerpt from an interesting article in the Winston-Salem Journal about one person’s journey to Scoville lucidity:

Scoville unit a pain-free way to judge chile’s heat

By Michael Hastings
JOURNAL FOOD EDITOR

I probably should have checked a chart of Scoville Heat Units before buying that Tabasco chile-pepper plant for my garden.

If I had, I might have decided that Tabasco peppers may be too hot for even my fire-loving taste buds.

A Scoville Heat Unit is a measurement for the spiciness of chile peppers. In 1912, a chemist named Walter Scoville came up with a way to rate the spicy heat of chiles.

The Scoville Organoleptic Test originally involved blending ground chiles with a series of increasingly diluted sugar and water solutions. A panel of tasters would taste the solutions, noting when they got to a solution that did not burn their mouths. Scoville then gave a number to the amount of dilution needed for each chile. The higher the number, the greater the heat.

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As expected, and with a thrill in his wee ol’ heart, Bret from Jungle Jim’s has let us know that they are officially sold out on tables for the vendor’s hall. With 4+ dozen to their credit, we are actually surprised that they didn’t fill up sooner. In fact, there’s even a waiting list for those still hoping to get some space should any of the vendors currently registered need to drop out. The waiting list looks like this:

Sweg’s Salsa
Hell’s Kitchen
Pitrelli’s Pasta Sauce
Chooch & Pootan Inc.
Galloway Gourmet Foods

It would be nice if these guys are able to make it, but we thought at least they deserved a mention here. More things to come about the Weekend of Fire, so stay tuned!

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