Like It Hot? Store Carries Sauce To Burn
Ay carumba! Call 911! Another five-alarm fire at 415 Sherman in Coeur d’Alene.
Customers run out into the street sweating and shaking. Tears pour from their eyes. But a fire hose is no match for Endorphin Rush or Gib’s Nuclear Hell and especially not for Dave’s Insanity Sauce.
“That one’s so hot, I won’t allow it to be used in the store,” says Pat Travis, proprietor of the Que Pasa? Chili Co.
“Macho” takes on new meaning in Pat’s place, where he specializes in sauces potent enough to blister skin.
Dried red chili peppers and posters glorifying the great Tabasco hang from his walls. Hundreds of long-necked bottles wearing names such as Blair’s Beyond Death and Scorned Woman taunt hot-sauce connoisseurs with their warnings. This is not a place for the faint of mouth.
Pat encourages his shoppers to taste a drop on the end of a toothpick before buying. But some want a spoonful.
“People insist on trying. We tell them it’s beyond them, but they take the bottle from us,” Pat says, sharing a knowing smile with his wife, Jannelle.
“I thought one poor man would lose his lunch,” Jannelle says, laughing. “I tried to warn him, but there’s this macho thing.”
Pat’s a chili chef extraordinaire with the trophies to prove it. He had packaged and sold his chili mix and his own barbecue sauce for a few years. But the hassles were many and the profits were few, so he switched to selling already-bottled sauces.
He tastes everything he sells and rates all recipes on a 1-10 heating scale, which he shares with the customers who can find his well-hidden shop. It has no entry from the street.
People with asbestos tongues have to walk through the Taco Dude restaurant’s rear dining room and up the back stairs to a cozy loft. That’s where Texas Sweat hot sauce and the “Meltdown Cookbook” await.
“You have to really want it,” Pat says. Apparently, people do.
Toe-tapping time
Dancing to the Coeur d’Alene Marimba Ensemble is better than back-to-back aerobics classes. The music is so intoxicating that the exercise is painless (until the next day).
Bounce to the marimba band and the Renovators at Coeur d’Alene’s Sorensen Elementary School at 8 p.m. Saturday. Tickets are a steal - $3 for kids and $5 for adults - and the money goes to the Coeur d’Alene Cultural Center. Call 667-0625.
Panhandle picks
Don’t believe television is worthless. This Friday and Sunday, Idaho Public Television will focus on Sandpoint’s history and personalities. It’ll tell the story of fisherman John Campbell and of the Prime Timers, a 50-plus ski group that’s rocking Schweitzer Mountain Resort.
On Nov. 24 and 26, the focus will switch to the Silver Valley and the following week to Lewiston. For most of the Panhandle, Idaho Public TV is channel 26.
It was a very good year
My family eagerly accepted my husband Tom’s decision to enter politics in 1990.
We wore our black “Taggart for Clerk” T-shirts until they disintegrated. We knocked on doors until our knuckles cracked. We smiled so hard in so many parades, our cheeks cramped.
It was all for one and one for all. Who could say no to the Taggarts?
Still, early returns left Tom in last place and punched holes in our optimism. It was a gut-wrenching night, but our euphoria when Tom won made it a most memorable year.
What year warms your heart each time it comes to mind? Write about it in up to 300 words and it might run in this column the last week of December. Remember your best times for Cynthia Taggart, “Close to Home,” 608 Northwest Blvd., Suite 200, Coeur d’Alene, ID, 83814; FAX to 765-7149; or call 765-7128.
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo