I lived in Mexico for 30 years. The best to drink when you are “enchilado” is cold milk. The worst is hot coffee. When I make salsa:

Lots of cilantro, some very good tomatoes, a spoonful of sugar, Maldon salt, lime or lemon juice to taste and four or five serranos with the “nervios” and seeds taken out. The deal is to put this all in the blender but you swirl the cilantro last. If the salsa is to hot you make it less so by adding more tomatoes. The secret to this salsa is not to use onions.

You then fry store bought tortillas nice and dark. There is nothing like the taste of a freshly fried tortilla. The taste disappears after an hour or so.

My fave hot sauce is the Yucatecan brand of green habanero pepper. For variety try a very hot Portuguese Piri-Piri pepper sauce. A very hot but interesting variant comes from Manchester, Jamaica. It is called Pickapeppa — Hot Pepper Sauce. It is similar in taste to Tabasco but a lot hotter.

The bell pepper and chilies came from Bolivia. Before Columbus, through trade those peppers went as far as Mexico. Cortéz took them to Spain. From Spain they crossed Extremadura to Portugal. From Portugal with the navigators they went around South Africa (the Piri-Piri pepper is that item in question) and other hot peppers went to India.