Q1 2K16 Update

Unlike the last 3 years, this year started off with a thud. Typically I’ll have a couple sauces lined up and ready for reviews, but this year, due to the asshats that owned our former rental selling it to an even bigger couple of asshats, who then proceeded to terminate our lease in the middle of a month, it became mostly a full-on scramble, with the focus then on [moving and] emptying the fridge of open sauces rather than starting new ones, because moving less open stuff in the fridge is moving less open stuff in the fridge. On the plus side, that did afford an opportunity for several new sauces, so a silver lining of sorts there.

Obviously, the impact of that kind of news is going to dominate everything else, but once February hit, it was back into the swing of things with filling the door and back of fridge with open bottles again…or at least as much as the menu allowed. That means…*ahem*…3 new sauces for February. This is also 3 total for all of 2016 by the end of February, so not exactly setting the hot sauce blog review world on fire there. I added 1 more sauce this month, so still slower than normal. I am going to be doing a sweep soon, which will clear up more space, but the majority of sauces I have on deck are all of the decidedly hotter “back of fridge” variety and those, by nature, go through rotation much slower generally.

Most of the sauces this year have been stronger entries, so that is good news. I also did some experimenting and wound up using one of the lower heat sauces as an actual pizza sauce, which worked stunningly well. Still no blazing leaders for Sauce Of The Year, but several strong entries, which is encouraging. We still have a lot of road ahead of us for this year, though, so I remain hopeful. 

Aside from that, haven't really found anything crazy restaurant-wise, but I haven't been looking much, either. My travel schedule, once that Jan/Feb hiccup was over, precludes a lot of that and won't wind up settling down until probably more towards fall. I'm getting pretty close to needing to do another buy on lower heat sauces, so I feel the remaining 9 months should do better than the first 3.