Hot sauces. I’m not sure how this happened, but I now put hyper hot sauce on many foods I prepare at home. Occasionally it’s a few drops in a giant batch of this or that, but more frequently it’s actually bite-by-bite.

A couple years ago I bought a bottle of Muerte, a hot sauce with chipotle made by a company called Blair’s, based in Jersey. It had a little skull keychain and from when I first saw the bottle I knew I was going to get it whether I truly intended to use it or not. Well that bottle ended up barely used, until I rediscovered it a couple months ago. It has a nice smokey chili flavor and really augments anything meaty. As I began to use it with increasing frequency (leading up to a stunning quantity on eggs in particular) I picked up another kind, a sweet and deadly mix of habaneros and mangos, and that was the true tipping point. Fantastically flavorful and exciting to try on different things, that mango bottle transformed most of my diet. So that led to other discoveries, and what you see in the picture above is how my dining table now looks on a full-time basis.

The secretary is playing christmas music and I want to barf.