Hot! Hot! Hot!

I suppose, living in the SW desert, we should expect hot temperatures during the summer. Last year was miserable with temps like these, and hotter, on a daily basis:

Thankfully, this summer wasn't nearly as hot although we baked a little on a few days. You know it's hot when the chickens pant.

Now that Fall has arrived, I am willingly ready for hot- hot... chile that is! Green chile. New Mexico green chile! And lots of it!

This stuff is addictive and the store bought cans are no match for the real thing. People come from miles and miles to buy bushels of it. I imagine most of you are familiar with the famous Hatch green chile, but I guess I'm biased. I think they grow the best green chile here in the Pecos River Valley. There are two farms I buy from, but this is the one I went to the other day:

They were busy:

This is one stop shopping for all of your fruit and vegetable needs. Especially when your garden withers:

They have Parkers which have an amazing flavor, but are fairly tame, about medium, and then you can have Big Jims (hot this year), and hotter, and then there is stupid hot. :) This year I bought 1 bushel of hot and 1 bushel of Big Jims. The Big Jims are meatier and perfect for chile rellenos. I think I ended up with stupid hot because these are a tad warm. So I popped in for something a bit less firey because I didn't want to send the crew into bawling fits.

A nice gentleman named Gustavo will roast all the chile your little heart desires:

These were the first batch I bought.

Each of these sacks will yield about 25 quart bags.

Then you go back for more because running out of green chile is not an option:

This makes 75 bags of green chile in our freezer:

 I rush home to pop them into baggies and stick them in the freezer. I don't remove the seeds or the charred skin. The old timers and locals say they keep their flavor better with the skin on so I just take it off when I pull them out to use them.

Some years it's a gamble as to how hot they will be. So much depends on the weather. I grow jalapenos in my garden and some years they are just insane and others they aren't much hotter than a green pepper. When I make jalapeno poppers for the crew they always laugh when someone gets a crazy hot one because they know that the mate to that pepper is still lingering somewhere on that plate...pick a pepper, any pepper.

Bring on the green chile stew...and the Mexican Lasagna...and the green chile corn casserole...and the chile rellenos...and the fajitas...and the Buckaroo Bundles...and the steak burritos...and the smothered chicken...and the steak Tampequena .

Sometimes I try a new recipe and I'll ask DH if he likes it. His answer is often, "Yeh. It's great, but it would be REALLY be amazing with green chile." :)