Letter From the UK – March 2010

It is almost time for the first Chilli Festival in the UK for 2010, at the end of the month we have the Fiery Foods UK Chilli Festival in Brighton, at which Both Darth naga and myself will be attending to assist in the events and report on what happens. This year the BBC will be coming along to make a program about Pleasure and Pain, so we hope to get involved if we can.

The past month has been as busy as any I can remember, we have had over 100 sauces in for review since the new year and they still keep coming, with 5 more arriving today.

We did finally get our hands on the new UK version of the Pringles Xtreme, and they did not win much praise here at the ChileFoundry HQ, Our favourite snacks and Still Blairs Death Rain and the Nandos Crips we tried late last year.

Darth has been working hard tasting sauces, we have a big backlog of things to review, but he did manage to review: Melinda’s Naga Jolokia Sauce, Blair’s Salsa De La Muerte, Chilli Pepper Peter Naga Green Headhunter Sauce, Fire Foods Nitro was this months video review, and finishing up with Chilli Pepper Company’s Naga Mama which has been one of my favourites this year.

I reviewed the Dartmoor Chilli Farm’s Chilli Jelly which was a one of the best I have tasted, South Devon Chilli Farm “15” Chilli Sauce which we took away on a quick holiday and my family finished the bottle, Montezuma’s Chilli Dark Chocolate, Domino’s new Pizza the Meltdown Revenge as well as a few recipes, and other news reports.

Chillies Galore knocked Scorchio from the top spot in our UK top 10 Web sites, with well known Chilli seed company “Simpson’s Seeds” making it in for the first time.

During all of this we also upgraded our web server and migrated the site, while this was going to be a simple 20 minute job it turned into a 3 day saga as we tried to get wordpress to work as it had before, now we are moved and while we still have a minor font problem, we have moved and the site does seem to be faster than before.

While I as waiting for the sites to migrate I knocked up a quick site for myself so I can keep a track on the other chilli related blogs and news sites with out having to visit all 15 each day www.thechillireview.co.uk, it reads the sites RSS feeds and turns it into my own little world chilli newspaper, I was going to keep it just for my self, but what the heck.