Good morning, Hank, it's Tuesday.

I'm a little bit overwhelmed with anxiety at the moment. Here's a video about how to make hot sauce if you want your hot sauce to cost about $65 per bottle. So first, you're gonna wanna buy this portable planter thing and put it somewhere in your house. For me, the guest bathtub. Then, through the magic of water and light, turn some seeds into pepper plants. You want these pepper plants to be weird by the way. Like, anybody these days can get ghost peppers. I'm talking about weird early 20th century varietals of Habaneros and Lipstick Peppers and Paper Lanterns. Right, so you grow these seeds in a bathtub, which is a totally normal thing to do, and around April, they're ready to plant in the garden.

Now this process will be time consuming and annoying, but don't worry. The process of weeding and watering over the next four months will be much more time consuming and annoying. But you're not doing this to make yourself happy really, you're doing it to kind of keep yourself sane, like, it's just good news for you to have to touch plants and take care of something. Right, so eventually you'll have a bunch of beautiful peppers and you'll begin to harvest them in their literal thousands because you went just a little over the top this year and ended up with a lot of peppers.

Now once you got the peppers harvested, it's time to finally start to make the hot sauce which is inexplicably going to occur in vertical video. First, you got to cut the stems off the peppers and then toss them into a blender and you really want to crush their little pepper souls until they're quasi-liquefied. Now we're making a pepper mash hot sauce so once the peppers are blended, you add the appropriate amount of salt, around a tablespoon for every 3 lbs of peppers, but don't worry. If you get this wrong, it's not like the entire process will be ruined or anything. Just kidding, it will. Anyway, then you pour your mash into a fermentation jar and close up the jar and write what the heck you just made in sharpie because you will forget. Like, this one is called Mostly Scotch Bonnet, on account of how it's mostly Scotch bonnet peppers. And then every day as you're getting the kids ready for school, you burp the jars which just means opening them up a tiny bit so the gas can come out. I don't know what kind of gas. I don't know how fermentation works. And then after about three weeks of fermentation, it's time to open the jars which is what we in the pepper business call, "The Big Money No Whammies Moment," because if you mess something up, there will be a bunch of mold on the jar and in the pepper mash and all of your work up to now will have literally been for nothing.

And then you'll stare into the middle distance for a while and wonder why you put yourself through this every year when you don't even like hot sauce this much. Although for the record, homemade hot sauce is miles better than the store stuff. But look lucky you, there is no mold. Hallelujah. Now it's time to actually make some hot sauce. Cut up four cloves of garlic, add a quarter cup of white wine vinegar. If you're an artist like mem you might have the vinegar already be spicy because it's pepper vinegar your mom made with some of your 10,000 excess peppers. Now mush that all together. Mush. Go to the highest mush setting. Look at that, my God, it's beautiful. Now you taste test with your finger because you're classy and it is good. It's really good Wow, is it good. Now you take your funnel and bottle that hot sauce.

You can't sell this because it wasn't made in a commercial kitchen and also because the only way to make it profitable would be to charge like $80 a bottle so instead, you'll give it out to family and friends for the holidays. Now you have hot sauce and you feel a little less anxious because it's good to have hobbies in this world, especially if it's a hobby you get to share with your mom.

Hank, I'll see you on Friday.

Sydney Green: And it's pepper, uh, well it's actually just pepper and
vinegar.

John: I don't know if I should tell you, but it's all voice-over. 

Sydney: Oh, oh yeah. So I'd like for you to touch it and make a
face.

John: Hooo!