Book excerpt: Recipes for the most popular dishes from the collection of “the high priest of hot stuff,” the author of Chili Peppers and The Founding Foodies (Sam Gugino, James Beard Award-winning food journalist). For the past three decades, Dave DeWitt has devoted his life and career to chile peppers and fiery foods, and he publishes the huge Fiery Foods & Barbecue Central (fiery-foods.com), which includes hundreds of articles and thousands of recipes. This new book is composed of the very best dishes from DeWitt’s collection of chile pepper-laden recipes from around the world that he’s acquired on his travels, from colleagues, and by researching authentic, obscure, and out-of-print cookbooks. The book is loaded with a vast array of hot and spicy favorites, including a huge variety of soups, stews, chilis, and gumbos; a broad selection of barbecue dishes for the grill; and a lengthy list of meatless entrees and vegetable options. Included are not just hundreds of spicy main dishes, but also a surprising array of zesty beverages, desserts, and breakfasts. In some chapters in this book, the recipes are grouped by type of recipe; in the others, they are organized in the order of chile peppers’ spread around the globe: South and Central America, Mexico, the Caribbean, U.S.A., Europe, the Mediterranean and Middle East, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and Asia and the Pacific. The book is truly the very best the world has to offer in terms of great spicy foods “When it comes to hellfire, no one can turn up the heat like Dave DeWitt.” —Steven Raichlen, author of Project Smoke