January 21, 2023

WEEKLY MENU 01.22.23

We’re warming up with spicy foods during the Weekly Menu 01.22.23 ~

National Hot Sauce Day falls during the Weekly Menu 01.22.23 – and we are going with it. You might sense a… theme with our Weekly Menu. Not everything has hot sauce, but a lot of it is spicy. Of course the spice level is up to the cook in most cases, so never fear, your belly won’t be in a constant uproar.

We’re a pretty hot family. Spice-wise, anyway. We all like varying degrees of heat, with the young’uns liking it a bit more than us more seasoned members. (Affiliate links follow. See Disclaimer Page for details.) I love hot sauce. I love them all, but my go-to’s are the classics: Tabasco and Frank’s Red Hot.

Has anyone else wondered if the spice level of these two has dropped? Maybe we simply became accustomed to it?

Tomato, tomahto, huh?

Tabasco Sauce was created in 1868 by William McIlhenny in Louisiana – Avery Island, to be exact. It’s still produced there by the same family. The sauce is a huge component of many of the foods in Louisiana, and most especially of New Orleans, one of my all time favorite places. Many, many, many moons ago, I brought back a literal jug of Tabasco hot sauce in my carry on. (Couldn’t risk that baby to the luggage handlers.) It was made of glass, and, as you might expect, was ridiculously heavy. I persevered, and it decorated the top of the refrigerator for years until it started turning brown. Then we cracked it open and used it. (It was fine despite the color change.)

I had several decorations in my fabulous (previous) black and white kitchen that came from NOLA.

The jug looked like this, but with original Tabasco:

I had several of these (not the whole case).

And I had something kind of similar to this~

It didn’t look anything like that, honestly. No black background at all. It was a white tile in a light wood frame with a bottle of tabasco in the middle of it. It was on the diagonal and looked super cute hanging in the kitchen. I have absolutely no idea where that ever went.

Of course, even when I was guzzling Tabasco, Frank’s Red Hot was on the shelf. Frank’s was also created in Louisiana, obviously a real hot spot for, well, hot sauce. Frank’s wasn’t created until 1918 in New Iberia. Methinks Adam Estilette & Jacob Frank might have been the OG copy cats, huh? I will say, though, that the two sauces are really very different. And I adore Tabaso, but Frank’s has a little more flavor than Tabasco, at least to me. Anybody else?

Frank’s also has the advantage of being world famous through no fault of its own. Teressa Bellissimo created the original Buffalo Chicken Wing at The Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York. She didn’t have a lot to work with, so she fried a part of the chicken that didn’t usually get eaten and paired it with a fabulously easy sauce made with Frank’s Red Hot Sauce and butter. That classic sauce is still eaten everywhere today. Including at our house!

We should probably buy this size, we go through so much of it:

I love Frank’s tagline~

According to the Frank’s Red Hot site, that tagline has been around since 2009, shockingly.

In a momentary aside, Shout out to Baby Boy

Happy Birthday to our Baby on Sunday. We’ll miss you, Sweetie, but are sure you’ll have a great birthday at school. {{Hugs}}

I’m pretty much an all around spice girl. Not a Spice Girl. I don’t sing. At least not where anyone can hear it. But I love any type of spice. We try all sorts of different hot sauces, spices, blends, chilis, peppers… you get the idea. So our Weekly Menu 01.22.23 starts out with a Frank’s Red Hot Sauce BANG! and fires up with spice in some form pretty much every night.

We’re tossing cooked Pop’s Crispy Chicken in Buffalo Wing Sauce and serving them on top of a salad with crumbled blue cheese and some crunchy celery on Sunday. The Buffalo Wing Sauce is basically a half cup of Frank’s with a tablespoon of butter melted in. Doesn’t get any easier or more authentic than that.

Sunday during the weekly Menu 01.22.23 is SUPER spicy.

Sunday also has two experimental recipes: the Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies should be good, with just a pinch of spice. I really love the idea of Tabasco ice cream, so I’m going to doctor up a pint of good vanilla ice cream with the flavoring ingredients in the recipe for the Tabasco Smoked Chipotle Dark Chocolate Ice Cream. I’ll have a backup container of ice cream at the ready, so if this recipe is terrible, we’ll splash a bit of Fireball Whisky on the backup. (Quick aside, dear reader: Fireball is not only one of my favorite whiskeys, Atomic Fire Balls continue to be one of my all time favorite candy, second only to SweeTARTS.)

We couldn’t have a spicy week without D’s favorite, so Chicken Fra Diavolo obviously made the cut. Even the Garlic Bread has hot sauce in it. We did get the recipe from Guy FIERI after all. And on Friday, we’ll blaze up the Cajun Wedding Soup with Cajun spice and Tabasco.