Costa Rican Table Sauce: Salsa Lizano

This is a common brown to reddish brown sauce in Costa Rica and it's made at home by some, but it is also commercially produced and sold in bottles. It is sprinkled onto various foods and it is also used in recipes, especially in Costa Rican style rice and beans, called "Gallo Pinto" (I'll be doing this soon). It is not very spicy hot, although I like to add a hot dried red chili to the recipe for a little "zip."

The ingredients will be processed/blended, so how you chop them is not all that important.

Ingredients:

3 Guajillo or Ancho (dried Poblano) chilies, seeded and stems removed
(optional) 1 dried hot red chili 
1/4 cup onion, chopped
1/2 cup carrot, peeled and chopped
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon white vinegar
2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon molasses
1 cup water to cook the chilies, then used in the sauce
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 heaping teaspoon ground black pepper
2 teaspoons salt

Simmer the chilies in a cup of water for 6 or 8 minutes. Add the chilies and water to a blender or processor. Add the other ingredients and blend or process until smooth

WORD HISTORY:
Peon-This word is related to "pedestrian," a Latin derived word borrowed by English, and it is distantly related, through Indo European, to "foot," a word from the Germanic roots of English. It goes back to Indo European "ped/pod," which meant "foot, lower part of the leg." This gave Latin "pes," meaning "foot," with the accusative case being "pedem," and the dative being "pedi," and all plural cases beginning with "ped." This produced Latin "pedonem" meaning, "one who goes on foot," which in the Middle Ages took on the specific meaning, "foot soldier." This gave Portuguese "peon," which later became "peão," with the "foot soldier" meaning. The Portuguese and the English established themselves in India, and in the 1600s, English borrowed the word from Portuguese, but in India, and it meant (specific to India), "a native Indian member of law enforcement," but also "foot soldier" and "one who delivers messages on foot." Meanwhile, Spanish had "peon" from the same Latin source as Portuguese, but it had taken the meaning, "worker." By the first half of the 1800s, American English had picked up the meaning "farm worker working off a debt to a landowner" from Mexican Spanish, and this became the prime meaning in American English, with further development into, "low status worker" (from the idea of working low level jobs to pay debt). This became the main meaning in English.