Great ingredients make for great meals. Whenever you can, use the highest quality supplies for your recipes. The flavor difference will always come through in your finished dish.
If there is an ingredient that you are not familiar with, check our Ingredient section. There are pages and pages of information about the ingredients used in my recipes.
Ingredient Information
Spice it up!
The recipes on this Web site are not all that spicy. They would be considered mild - call it “one pepper.” I like my food hotter. Not “four peppers” mind you, but at least a two or three pepper count on a scale of one to five (five being too hot for almost anyone).
There is a tomatillo salsa recipe that I prepared for a television segment a few years ago and the producer told me that the network felt that the recipe was too spicy. “Too spicy?” I replied.“No, it can't be.” So we made a version and had the crew of about ten people give their opinions. This would have been what I felt was a two and a half pepper rating. The results were about even. 3 said it was hot enough or could be hotter, 3 said it was about right and 4 said it was too hot.
I have modified the recipes in this book to be a “one pepper” spiciness. If you double the spice (peppers, chili powder, cayenne, hot sauce, etc.) it will be a two, triple will be about a three, etc. I generally tell people to start with the printed recipe and go slowly.
By the way, the spice doesn't add a significant amount of calories usually but in a dish where there are more complex flavors like a Melon Salsa the higher heat may obscure the other flavors.