Hi! I'm Dave, a hot sauce lover, and accidental gardener, grateful husband, and proud father of two. In my early twenties, I couldn't get enough of wings smothered in hot sauce - The hotter, the better! After a bit, the hot sauce was... well, empty... yeah, it was how, but it had no substance - No flavour.

When our kids were young, we had a small garden where we grew the basics: tomatoes, green onions, pumpkins (for the kids), carrots, etc. Then one year I got a Jalapeno pepper plant... I was hooked.

Fast forward to 2005, when we moved to rural Ottawa, to the village of North Gower. Six garden plots, hot peppers (43 different varieties), sweet peppers, onions, garlic, ginger, carrots, tonnes of herbs, 5 varieties of tomatoes, asparagus, raspberries... well, you get the picture (so I won't mention the potatoes, leafy greens, beans, zucchini, cucumbers and that every year we try growing something new).

I had fresh ingredients grown organically at my fingertips to start playing with flavours and heat levels. As a note: any ingredients we need to source, we look to source from local growers. When I started, Danette's tolerance for heat was very low. Now, if you look at her recipes in the Get Inspired section, you will see that the hot sauces are part of almost every meal!