This year I decided, on a lark, to make hot sauce as an Xmas/Festivus/New Year’s gift for friends and family. It turned out so well I want to recommend this particular culinary adventure to anyone who hasn’t tried it before — even if you can’t cook worth a damn.

Trawling google for recipes taught me that just about anything involving mashing up hot peppers could very well be called “hot sauce” and would likely be palatable. I selected this recipe as a base because it, unusually, featured canned peaches and molasses. I substituted a peck of random peppers I had picked up from the farmer’s market last summer for the habaneros, skipped the mustard, added some minced onion and garlic, and substituted seasoned rice vinegar for white vinegar. In true “anything goes” style cooking most quantities were eyeballed and no timepiece was employed.

The end result was the tastiest hot sauce I’ve ever had. Not hot-beyond-reason, but packing plenty of both flavour and kick. Given how quick and painless it was to make, I think I may be hooked on homemade hot sauce for life.

Some Miscellaneous Pepper Pointers:

» To avoid getting pepper oil all up in your mucus membranes, wear gloves or a plastic bag on your hands while you prepare the peppers, do the prep in a well-designated area, and clean up carefully afterward.

» If you want to sear the peppers first (for flavour, I think?) watch out for that hot pepper smoke (my lungs!)

» If you’re afraid of producing something diabolically hot, start with just a few peppers then add more at the end to dial in heat you can eat.

» Read up on capsaicin, the active ingredient in hot sauce. Fascinating stuff, as any tarantula knows.

Here’s the thing:

• » I live in a cold climate
• » I have an outdoor cat
• » He’s a sissy

What this means is that there is a lot of opening and closing of exterior doors in my apartment. A cat door isn’t really an option since we’re renters (can’t cut holes) and have an open floorplan (no drafts from semi-open windows please!). So instead of bringing the cat inside to warm up I thought I’d install a “cat chalet” on my rear balcony. This would, in theory, allow the cat to spend more time outside, find shelter if he ends up outside for the night/several days, and cut down on plaintive meowing at the window.

For the design itself, I used a two-story re-purposed-election-sign construction (the cat enters at the base and then clambers up to the second floor) in order to trap warm air, igloo-style. I kept the “observation deck” compact (for coziness) by using curves instead of corners. The floor is insulated and (not seen in the photos) has some carpeting and a blanket for warmth.

Does it work? To be honest I haven’t followed through with this project (I still need to install the thing outside and weigh it down a bit) because I stumbled across a much cleverer design in a comment in a random forum once mine was done. Here’s the core of it: Attach an open-backed cat shelter to an exterior window. Heat that would be lost anyways goes instead to warm the cat shelter. Very elegant.

Now what could be quickly repurposed to serve as a window cat chalet…

In our twitterfied times, handwritten letters are both rarer and more appreciated than ever. They’re special because they represent a sincere and personalized effort — something like seeing a friend to the door as opposed to grunting at them from the couch as they let themselves out. And all it takes is a pen, a piece of paper, an envelope and a stamp!

Actually, at least for me, that’s a lot of things to keep handy. Which is why I was delighted to come across this elegant way of folding up one-to-three sheets of paper into their own envelope — no tape, glue, or wax required. If you keep a few stamps in your wallet, you can grab a piece of paper and have a letter ready for the mailbox in five minutes flat.

I don’t recall where I first stumbled upon this design, but you can find it here as one among many at Gerard Hughes’ Envelope and Letterfolding site. Go ahead and surprise someone with a 19th century status update — you’re almost guaranteed to make their day.

Was it the first knot you ever learned? Pretty sure it was mine. I have a hunch that learning to tie your shoes tends to be a traumatic experience. The parents are eager, the laces are mystifying, and if your handiwork comes undone alarms sound (”You’re going to trip, fall and die!”).

So it may come as a relief to learn that the classic shoelace knot really is fraught with peril. It can be tied wrongly very easily, and even when tied correctly it can’t be expected to stay put in rough conditions such as while hiking. Happily, there are many superior ways to tie your shoes. I favour one of the simpler ones. Here’s the trick:

Wrap twice instead of once before finishing the standard shoelace knot.

That’s it! That one extra wrap (see Ian’ shoelace site for a step-by-step guide) makes all the difference  and may eliminate days’ worth of retieing over your lifetime. And if it should fall upon you to teach a kid their first knot you’ll be able to show them a good one. Not bad for a manoeuver you can master in about 10 minutes.

Jay here – a recent yet confirmed admirer of Five Whys. Neale has encouraged me to write up some blog posts to entertain and inform while he’s holidaying. In the spirit of the season I’ve come up with a handful of projects that could (just barely) serve as New Year’s Resolutions. May they all pass muster.

Sorry for the sparse posts for the holiday season, but I’ve been busy getting ready for my various travels. Here’s a very quick post with something I ran across in the Canadian War Museum. It’s a tea-set made in World War I out of old shells and bullets, fashioned by an artisan who was waiting to go into battle.

Regret the error has an exhaustive rundown of what he considers to be the top errors and apologies from the world of journalism for 2008. This includes, along with the extremely regrettable typo pictured here, the following gems:

Michael Platt’s editorial on July 21, 2008 may have inadvertently left the impression that General Motors in some way supported neo-Nazis. That was not the intention of the line in question and the Sun greatly regrets not being more clear in the story.

In a story about Obama’s plans for a vice presidential pick, AP noted that McCain was considering Sen. Joe Lieberman, “the Democratic vice presidential prick in 2000 who now is an independent.”

There is no documented evidence to suggest dance poles sold at Condom Shack cannot bear the weight of a user. An unsubstantiated claim appeared in a Post Homes feature on Saturday.

Via Fagstein.

Here’s a little change of pace. I ran across this little gem of a book at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in New York City last week. Despite how it might look on video, this is a completely low-tech mechanical system, comprised of an acetate layer moving over a photo created from cut-up frames of motion.

The concept is so utterly simple, yet the resulting animation is surprisingly fluid.

Buy on Amazon

Music by Adam and the Amethysts (used completely without permission—please don’t sue me Adam).

Andrew has brought my attention to these great long exposure photographs of St. Petersburg Russia by Alexey Titarenko.

This is the time of year where we start seeing innumerable year-end best-of lists. Sean of Said the Gramophone, who kindly did some guest posts here this week, has one of the best: his 50 Best Songs of the Year. They’re in MP3 form and ready for downloading. It’s a great way to learn about new music you may not usually hear.

This is also following fellow Gramophone writer Dan Beirne’s Top 10 Albums of 2008.