Fresh-from-the-garden habanero hot sauce

WARNING: Do not touch your eyes, nose, mouth, or any other sensitive areas of your body when working with habaneros. You will regret it.

This year I tried to grow some habanero peppers in my garden. I only ended up with a single one from the entire plant, but even a tiny bit packs a punch. Because of that, the only real use for me is to make a sauce. I started by scaling back this recipe which calls for 5 habaneros. The sauce still ended up way too hot for me, so I further modified it to calm it down. The recipe I came up with is as follows:

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1/4 cup chopped carrots
• 1/4 cup chopped onion
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 habanero pepper, seeds removed
• 1 tbsp water
• 3 tbsp lime juice
• 1 tbsp white vinegar
• 2 tomatoes
• 1 tbsp sugar
• salt and pepper to taste

Directions

1. Saute the carrots, onion, and garlic in a saucepan until softened.
2. Pour them into a blender along with the habanero, water, lime juice, vinegar, and tomatoes. Blend until smooth.
3. Put the mixture back into the pan and bring to a simmer.
4. Add the sugar and season with salt and pepper. Stir until combined.
5. Reduce the mixture to your desired consistency.

The finished sauce should start off sweet and end up firey. If it's too hot more lime juice or sugar can be added to calm it down.