The Austin Chronicle Hot Sauce Festival was this weekend. This is maybe the seventh one I’ve been to. It’s grown to reportedly attract as many as 15,000 people. The price of admission was 2 cans of food for the Capital Area Food Bank. The main event, in my mind, is the individual contest. It takes place underneath the shade of a large tent in a big open spot in the middle of the park. There were lines for red, green, special and pico de gallo. With a cold beverage in hand, get in line and wait in the direct sunlight until you’re so hot you almost can’t stand it. One year, my black sandals were so hot that I was lifting my toes from their surface, and then standing in my own shadow.
Once you hit the shade of the tent, you’ve made it. You get a paper container of chips and face the gauntlet, a series of conference tables lined with a smorgasborg of homemade salsas. There was an impressive range of salsas: mild, hot, so hot it came with a warning label, smoked, fruit, creamy–a gamut. People compare notes; it’s as close as I’ve gotten to a wine tasting.
Bring extra chips. I always ran out before I hit the end of the table.
Bring a beverage container, preferably insulated. While there is cold water available free of charge, it’s easy to run out when you’re standing in the heat.
I’ve always suspected that cats are agents of alien intelligence, this week my suspicions were confirmed. A cat pulled off an operation that hitherto I’d only thought of as a fraternity prank. It was able to position itself directly above an air intake on the hood of my truck and urinate directly into the truck’s ventilation system, clearly an event that required planning. I don’t have AC in the truck. I found out when I turned on the fan full blast–hot cat pee wind. Like getting punched in the nose.
The typical industrial-strength response to heat is air conditioning. Living in Austin, Texas I’m in the AC a lot this time of year. It’s a classic positive feedback loop–the hotter it gets the more the AC runs, the more carbon dioxide is emitted, the hotter it gets and so on.
An article on www.slate.com puts it like this, “We’re cooking our planet to refrigerate the diminishing part that’s still habitable.”
There’s a phenomena I called the psychic hairball. By that, I mean a hairball of the psyche, not a hairball that can read your mind. Some people generally spit out anything that’s effecting their emotions almost immediately. For me it takes a while to build up, but then once it’s ready to go, look out, it’s going to be gross. Ack! Sorry. There it is, my psychic hairball.
We have figs, lots of them. Fig trees have a unique fruit-like structure, called the syconia, essentially an inside-out flower cluster. At the bottom of the syconia, there is a small opening, called an eye, which gets larger as the “fruit” turns color and ripens. In it’s native environs, female fig wasps enter and pollinate the flowers inside, laying eggs while they’re at it.
We’ve got the Petit Negri varietal, which is extremely prolific. Unfortunately, it has a rather large eye which provides entry for some kind of tiny beetles. Once they invade, the figs can turn into a gooey fermenting mess. However, if you pick the figs too early, they don’t have much flavor and are better for jam.
I’ve harvested a couple grocery bags of figs so far this year, have given some away and still have many. There aren’t a lot of recipes for fresh figs and they don’t keep long, even when refrigerated. I’ve tried drying tomatoes outside before, but due to the high humidity, I had moldy results. Alternative methods include oven drying or building a solar dryer, a little too ambitious for me. However, I came across a post on the internets where a woman described drying fruit in her car. Pure genius, the car seems to be a perfect solar dryer, hot but not too hot. Consequently, my lovely wife has been good enough to drive around with the “food pantry” food dehydrator, basically a mesh bag with racks, hanging in the back of her car. So far so good. I think they should be done by tomorrow.
Incidentally, Woodland Hills reached an all-time record high of 119 degrees F. July 22nd. You think it’s hot now? Wait until next year. And the year after that…