Our Story

Hi! My name is Ann and my husband's name is John. Our son's name is Evan. This is our continually evolving story about Texas Creek Products.

The Beginning
Back in the early 1990's, John and I lived in Sedro-Woolley, WA, about 70 miles north of Seattle. You've probably heard the stories about how much it rains in Seattle and that's pretty much the same for Sedro-Woolley.

Each fall, I would get together with a friend, and we would can a whole bunch of salsa for our families for the winter. John would take jars of the salsa to work on large construction projects and let the other guys on the crew taste the salsa. Pretty soon they were stealing the jars of salsa out of his lunch box!

Someone offered to buy a jar and soon John was taking 4-5 jars a day to work with him. We ran out of salsa by January. The guys wanted more so I canned up a couple more batches that winter.

By the time spring rolled around, I was playing around with making a fresh salsa based on the canned salsa recipe. We were excited to see how it would do out in the public, we took some to a swap meet. We asked folks wandering by if they'd like to buy some salsa. Everyone kept asking for a taste (OOPS! I didn't bring anything for samples!) So I went in to the snack bar and bought an order of nachos without the fake cheese sauce. We had to buy 3 more orders of cheese-less nachos by the end of the day, but we sold a lot of salsa.

We got licensed, found a kitchen to use, got into a farmer's market, came up with the name Cascade Premium Salsa, had our tattoo artist friend draw up the cool peppers that are on our labels, and soon the salsa was in 5 local grocery stores.

And that's how it continued until-

The Big Move
In 1998, we decided to move to eastern Washington, just over the mountains from our previous home, but a world away from the gray wet weather of western Washington. North central Washington is our home now.

I took a year off from making salsa after moving. But soon the call of the peppers got to me and I was back at it using a local shared-use kitchen, selling at the farmer's market and then in the local stores.

Eventually, the shared-use kitchen closed and in 2006, we made the decision to take the plunge and build a kitchen at our home. What a joy that is to have my own place right here! I can experiment with all kinds of new ideas any time I want.

The Ghost Fire Hot Sauce and the Tropical Ghost Hot Sauce Glaze took almost 3 years to develop and I don't know how many test batches to create. The BBQ sauce and the Spicy Worcestershire took over a year to develop.  And now with a couple of smoked habanero sauces coming online, the variety continues to expand. 

Please feel free to ask questions about any of the products. We'll try to answer as much as we can...without revealing too many secrets!

Why the name Texas Creek Products?
Because there really is a creek by the name of Texas Creek right outside our front door.

It's All Good!

A few pictures of the 2010 growing season-

Late in the season, fataliis in the green house

Paper plate full of Peruvian White Habanero chiles

Late harvest of Red Savina Habaneros, the green ones were riped in a paper bag before dehydrating and grinding.
The lavender patch-