HSB readers – Say hello to Thyla, the first female reviewer on the HotSauceBlog.com – besides the infamous wife. Thyla will be reviewing hot sauces as well as any spicy foods she encounters along the way.

Hiya Gang!

My name is Thyla, and I am one of the snazzy new guest bloggers at the Hot Sauce Blog. Like all my fellow guest bloggers, I too, am addicted to Hot Sauce and spicy food.

I tend to enjoy exotic cuisines and flavors, thanks to my upbringing, most of which happened in India. I belong to that rare minority of women who don’t have a sweet tooth. It’s probably because I burned the sweet-receptors right off with my first swig of hot sauce. My parents tell me that my favorite treat as a toddler was raw onion. (How they figured this one out will be covered in great detail with a suitably expensive therapist.)

I live in northern NJ with my husband who is utterly convinced that there’s something medically wrong with me because “…no one can eat all that capsaicin without seriously damaging something.” I tell him to take comfort in the fact that unlike all his male friends, he never has to buy me chocolate when he screws up. A bottle of hot sauce will do.

We share our home with a 3 year old Great Dane who is also addicted to Hot Sauce. You might be wondering why and how. Here’s what happened…

So, back when Trip was a puppy, he kind of liked to chew things. And by things I mean windowsills, coffee tables, the odd nightstand, etc. Like most new puppy parents. the first thing we did was to go out and buy a bottle of bitter apple. I then spend two days coating all the remotely chewable surfaces in the house with bitter apple. Trip didn’t even notice it. We then called the vet, who told us to try putting hot sauce on things.

I did.

He noticed it, and he LIKED it. He stopped chewing for about a day, during which time he licked all the hot sauce off of everything. Since then, we haven’t been able to trust him around any spicy food or stray bottles of hot sauce. To this day, whenever I want to eat something spicy, I have to first trick him into going to the basement so that we don’t have to make yet another emergency trip to our increasingly richer vet. Trip’s current favorite hot sauce is Cholula, mostly because it comes with a wooden cap that’s really fun to chew.

I’m starting to think about putting a lock on my fridge.