Chiles are Good

On the farm, we became obsessed with chile peppers.  We grew quite a few heirloom varieties, sold some of them and sent some in CSA boxes.  Once we even smuggled a variety of varieties in from Oaxaca and saved their seeds (which worked!).  We grew so many hot peppers that we usually just left them on the plants to dry up, I mean, we're talking like 100 plants of just the hot ones.  It seemed wasteful but we just couldn't stop growing them until one year I had an incredible idea to make hot sauce.  Over the next two growing seasons I think we bottled and sold about 400 bottles.  Our most popular being the garlic-thai blend.  It was a good start to a little value-added product (value-added is farm-speak for a processed version of your farm's raw product).  I sold all of our empty bottles at a garage sale before we moved into "the cites" which is unfortunate because I'm considering making more this upcoming season to sell at the Farmers' Market with my friend Sarah along with some other stuff.

Anyway, I used some delicious heirloom green chile powder tonight that I picked up in NM at the park ranger station near the petroglyphs.  It tastes really sweet (they roasted the chiles first) and has just a hint of hot.  I cooked it up with some carrots, celery, cabbage, garlic, and onions. It was quite tasty and made these non-Mexican type veggies suitable to accompany mexican rice and refried beans.  The powder is from the Native Seed Search non-profit.  We've been getting their catalog but I hadn't ordered anything.  They specialize in desert compatible seeds -things native to that part of the country.  I also bought some blue corn and amaranth baking mix, heirloom beans, and a red "hatch" chile powder.  Our lone souvenirs were food, of course.