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I learned how to make this hot sauce from my friend Rebecca, a small-town Kansas girl who ended up marrying a friend of mine from high school who is Lao-Hmong. Not only does she make this great hot sauce, her sticky rice and papaya salad are amazing too. I have a lot of friends who are in interracial marriages and I am always impressed by the ones who adapt and embrace a completely different culture. Although I love my husband and his Irish roots, I never quite fell in love with bubble and squeak, beef stews or potatoes served a hundred ways. I much prefer the bright, spicy, acidic flavors of southeast Asian food. Give me some lime, cilantro and fish sauce and call me a happy camper.
Rebecca makes this hot sauce by hand in a mortar and pestle so the colors are brighter and the flavors have more depth. I am lazy so I throw the whole lot into a mini food processor and bzzzzzzz, blend the crap out of it. This is a yummy dipping sauce for grilled steak and chicken and sticky rice, but with all the fresh ingredients, it will only last one extra day in the fridge. I poured the hot sauce into a long-necked bottle (which is what I had laying around), but a wide-mouth jar is much better for this chunky hot sauce. I added a hand-drawn label, created during some extremely dull moments of jury duty.
Read the recipe after the jump.
