A Hot Time in Old Town

The Los Angeles area finally has a store stocking nothing but chile pepper products. Among Hot Hot Hot’s 320 or so spicy offerings (which include Scorned Woman Sauce and I Am on Fire Ready to Die), you can even find one suitable for St. Patrick’s Day, Clancy’s Fancy. Trends in the boutique hot sauce world, reports co-owner Monica Bosserman Lopez, are unusual sauce bases (mango has been done, so now there are things like a yam-based habanero sauce called Flying Burrito Flounder Juice) and sauces even hotter than habanero (such as Dave’s Insanity Sauce, made with industrial capsaicin extract). For those who truly can’t get enough, the store stocks a brand of coffee beans roasted with cumin and jalapenos which Lopez privately describes as “silly.” Hot Hot Hot is at 56 S. Delacey St., Pasadena.

Pizzas for Literacy

This is the 125th anniversary of Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel “War and Peace.” In honor of the occasion, Domino’s Pizza is offering a coupon worth one Dominator-size pizza to the first 125 people who actually read the vast work from cover to cover and submit a two-page book report to War, Peace and Pizza, c/o Jericho Promotions, 924 Broadway, Fourth Floor, New York, N.Y. 10010. Class, you can open your books . . . now.

Peanut Butter and Jelly by the Yard

In order to make Guinness, the Peanut Advisory Board (with the help of Peanut, Penn., high school students) made a sandwich using 75 pounds of peanut butter and 50 pounds of jelly last year. Guinness sandwich rules require a continuous piece of bread, so a 37-foot loaf was baked at the local Pizza Hut. The pizzeria’s front window had to be removed to get it out of the building. After being displayed at the local peanut butter festival, the giant sandwich was donated to a community food bank.

White House Kitchen Firing

It was reported last week that White House chef Pierre Chambrin and three assistants have been asked to leave by the end of the month. The reason is reportedly that Chambrin cooks nothing but rich French food, while the Clintons prefer American food, preferably low-fat. (Curiously, pastry chef Roland Mesnier was not asked to resign.) A chef was asked to resign during the Reagan tenure, but this is the first time an entire White House kitchen staff has been shown the door.

An Ice-Cold Reproof

Coors Brewing Co., which spends heavily on literacy programs, is getting a lot of flack for a product named Artic (sic) Ice. But if they’d spelled it Arctic, Coors claims, they couldn’t have trademarked the name. “Miller didn’t spell ‘Lite’ right either,” retorted a spokeswoman.

Mussels Spared the Curse of Dermo

The hot news in mussel-raising is chub ladders--tubes hung from floats to provide baby oysters a safe place to grow, away from suffocating mud and hungry predators. They grow twice as fast as regular oysters, which means they’re more likely to reach harvestable weight without being attacked by oyster diseases such as dermo and MSX.