Day 6 - A Side Trip to New Mexico

Californian Green Chili Stew

served with tortilla chips, salsa, and cilantro/roasted pecan dip from Trader Joe's

When Randy and I were in New Mexico earlier this month, we took a chile (not chili) cooking class with Rocky Durham at the Santa Fe School of Cooking. It was a WOW!!! We made tortillas, red chile sauce and green chile sauce. We followed our Friday afternoon class with a Saturday morning visit to the Santa Fe farmers market. We brought home tortilla-grind masa harina and 2 pounds of red chile, 1 Chimayo-style from the School and 1 from a Chimayo vendor at the market.

Today I wanted to test my green chile roasting skills on our gas cook top by making the Santa Fe School of Cooking's Green Chile Stew. I made a version based on their cookbook's recipe and another that was on their web site 2 years ago. Of course, my green peppers were Californian, not New Mexican, but the resulting taste definitely had that New Mexico edge. As we learned in Rocky's class, chiles vary greatly depending on many factors: where they are grown, the type, the time of year, the soils, how much water they get and when, and so on. So no matter the taste, my chile was Californian Green Chile Stew. And, it was great! There are plenty of leftovers; I'm anxious to learn what the stew tastes like tomorrow.

Still holding at 5 Waters recipes down and 300 to go.

On a more mundane note, my creative time today (other than cooking) was spent hauling yet another load of stuff up from the storage lockers. My poor husband's knee is in such bad shape he can hardly walk; he bought crutches today. He also had it X-rayed this morning, the first step toward actually getting it fixed. Something tells me this is going to be a long week.