Thai roast chile pepper dipping sauce

This was a recipe recounted by Jarrett Wrisley in his Atlantic Monthly food blog, which you can find here:

food.theatlantic.com/abroad/recipe-grilled-beef-with-roas...

This dipping sauce is just gorgeous, and I heartily recommend making the roasted sweet rice powder yourself if you don't have a local source, and especially the roasted chile pepper powder which is as easy as could be. I used some chile pepper flakes which I bought from Penzey's, and the only trick is to really keep an eye on it, and keep stirring it --it's done in around five minutes.

My girlfriend & I kept on burying our nose in the freshly roasted pepper, sniffing slowly (so as not to actually breathe in the pepper powder, which I imagine would be ouchy) and deeply: so warm and toasty and fruity and peppery. Mmm!