If you’ve grown up with boring bland cooking, you probably still like boring bland cooking. But if you are like me, you know that a little bit of a kick makes the meal. That is why it is so important to select the right hot pepper sauce.

If you’re not familiar with Cajun cooking, Indian cuisine, or any of the other styles of food that rely heavily on hot pepper sauce, you’d be surprised by how much effort people put into getting just the right flavor with just the right kick. From Tabasco pepper sauce through powdered cayenne pepper and beyond, there are hundreds of thousands of flavors available. There are even whole brands that make nothing but hot pepper sauce. But my favorite thing of all is the hot pepper sauce Festival.

The hot pepper sauce Festival is kind of an underground phenomenon. It takes place in a different city every year, but it is always a city that features spicy cooking. The festival not only features hot pepper sauce, but recipes, barbecue sauce, cookoffs, contests, and live music. When it was in New Orleans, Cajun music was the thing. When it went up to Chicago, however, the blues got its turn. No matter where it is, the hot pepper sauce Festival is really something to behold.

The problem with cooking with a lot of hot pepper sauces is that your friends have to like them. This isn’t a problem with most things. If you like to use a lot of salt, you can use less salt when you have friends over who like it less. If you like to use a lot of onions, you can prepare onions with a side dish and leave them out of the main course. But if you like to use hot pepper sauce, it needs to go on everything.

Spicy cooking works as a system. You can’t just take the spice out of the dish and expect it to taste good. You are leaving out an essential ingredient, and the flavor will suffer. Of course, people who don’t like hot pepper sauce don’t know very much about flavor. I haven’t met a single person who doesn’t like hot pepper sauce and has an interesting pallet. Most of them like the basics: meat and potatoes. If your friends fit into this category, they might not even notice the dish is not right!

It seems like everyone and their Grandmother has a recipe for their favorite sauce to use on the barbecue. For some it’s a bottled sauce that they swear is the best they’ve ever had, while for others the barbecue sauce recipe they use has been passed on from generation to generation and is as closely guarded a secret as you’ll ever find.

If you’re not fortunate enough to have an ancestor with a love of all things grilled, you’re probably going to spend a good deal of time trying to find the perfect barbecue sauce recipe. Unless you are willing to settle for the bottled variety, it’s a trek that is filled with tasty treats.

There are a ton of great resources when it comes to finding more information on barbecuing. The first place you might want to start is with the cookbooks you already have. Almost every cookbook has at least one recipe for a good barbecue sauce. Depending on the cookbook’s focus it might even be a spicy or Cajun style barbecue sauce recipe. It’s really a question of hit and miss at this point, so why not whip up a batch of barbecue sauce and give it a try?

One drawback to delving into the world of grilling sauce in this way is that many of the older cookbooks haven’t taken healthy eating into consideration. You may stumble on a great barbecue sauce recipe that is filled with fat. Although this is bound to be incredibly good, it’s not going to be as great for your well-being.

Fat free sauces have become the rage and honestly there are a number of great sauces specifically for grilling that taste fantastic. The key to finding a good barbecue sauce recipe that is heart healthy seems to be in the base. If the recipe calls for heavy oil such as a vegetable oil, this is going to add not only considerable calories but a good deal more fat as well.

I’d have to say, from my own personal experience, that it’s really a matter of personal taste. I used a standard barbecue sauce recipe and then played with the spice combination. My family prefers food that is hotter and more robust so I threw in extra cumin and chili powder and now everyone is happy when we eat grilled food.

Though fat is a part of our daily nutrition intake, most people are prone to eat an excess amount of fat in their diets. Switching over to low fat cooking can help people reduce the amount of fat they eat, can help maintain a healthy body weight, can help prevent disease and may potentially increase one’s life span.

There are four simple ways that a person can immediately introduce low fat cooking in their diet. These are trimming the fat off meat, switching to low-fat dairy products, using butter or margarine sparingly and changing cooking methods from roasting or frying to steaming or stir-frying. A person should attempt to eat fewer eggs, cheese and other dairy products, and cut down on red meat and chicken. These foods are high in saturated fats and contribute to heart disease.

If people find it difficult to exclude meat from their lives, using low fat cooking techniques can help to promote the removal of fat. A meat-based sauce or stew, for instance, can be cooked a day ahead and stored overnight in the refrigerator, to allow the fat to rise to the top of the dish and solidify for easy removal. Using more vegetables in stews can also help to reduce the amount of fat in the overall dish.

A way to reduce your intake of saturated fats is to substitute olive oil or sunflower oil for butter and tropical oils in low fat cooking. Although these oils have as many calories as saturated oils, they have a different effect on how cholesterol is broken down in your body – a major factor in heart disease.

Certain fish oils are particularly beneficial and contain a class of essential fatty acids known as omega-3 fatty acids. These help to lower cholesterol and reduce the blood’s ability to clog up arteries. As you adopt more and more low fat cooking methods, cooking ocean fish, such as mackerel, herring, tuna, sardines and salmon can all be used for their richness in this type of oil.

The more and more a person’s learns about where there are hidden fats in their daily cooking habits, the more aware they can be about adopting better low fat cooking methods. Trying to avoid things like deep fat frying, excessive amounts of butter or saturated oils in cooking, the fatty skin on all kinds of meat or copious amounts of gravy can help lower cholesterol levels and contribute to all over health.

Having a balanced diet with ample amount of exercise can change your life significantly. The old American diet of roasted meat and potatoes is being gradually replaced by low fat cooking rich in vitamins and unsaturated fats. It seems that people are living longer than they ever have, and this is largely due to our advances in medicine and our emerging knowledge of what we eat and how it affects our bodies.