Aug. 17 Las Cruces Style
Ah, chiles. What would life be like without
them?
It’s hard to imagine, this time of year,
when the Mesilla Valley is filled with the aroma of
roasting green chiles. When we fill our freezers with what we estimate will be
six months or even a year’s worth of the delectable, spicy pods. (Somehow, we
always go through them faster than we think we will.)
Luckily, frozen, chopped Hatch chiles are as
close as most of our nearest supermarkets, all year around. But I have learned
that what we take for granted is still a luxury in most of the world.
In fact, I had a chile-deprived childhood,
growing up in Michigan, where we mostly had to
make due with horseradish, the chile of the Midwest.
Yes, we had chili (with an “i” — the culinary concoction, not the chile pepper
itself), but the low-octane red powder available then never quite managed to
seriously spice our tame creations (usually ground beef, onions, canned
tomatoes and red kidney beans, maybe with a green bell pepper thrown in).
My siblings and I loved mom’s chili
nonetheless. It was as if we all knew there was something better out there,
somewhere.
This, you understand, was during the dark
ages, in the unenlightened times before salsa replaced ketchup as the the
nation’s favorite condiment. Before there was a Taco Bell in every town.
I don’t think I encountered my first real
chiles until I was in high school, at a Spanish Club banquet. And those were
canned. It would be several more years before I would encounter my first
jalapeño, and finally, taste my first green chile, fragrant and tattooed with
char marks, fresh from the roaster. It was love at first bite.
When I first moved to New Mexico in the
1980s, and discovered green chiles were served everywhere, even at the most
humble drive-throughs, I knew I’d come to my true home.
Since then, we’ve rarely been parted. When I
lived in Jamaica,
I got by with a large bag of powdered green chile (which I later realized was
grown and packaged in my true querencia, right here in the Green Chile Capital
of the Universe). Even native Jamaicans, raised on some formidable peppers
themselves, agreed that my green chile made everything better, including jerk
chicken, which was already pretty darn wonderful,
But “everything goes better with green
chile” is my continuing credo, tested only once in the two decades since I’ve
settled in chile paradise, when the Sun-News sent me off to a Sister Cities
Fiesta in Nienburg, Germany.
I’d lived happily in the region as a teenage
exchange student. I enjoyed my traveling companions and was happy to reunite
with some old friends and favorite places, foods and brews. When I nonetheless
found myself blue and listless after a few days, I realized I was suffering
from green chile withdrawal. I found a Mexican native who grew chiles in her
patio greenhouse and instantly perked up.
You may get a little taste of that, this
time of year, when monsoon season cuts our sunlight a bit, and we come as close
as we’ll ever get to knowing what Pacific Northwesterners experience during
their winter months when endless drizzle triggers migraines and SAD (Seasonal
Affective Disorder) for many. Do what you can to elevate your green chile level
a bit, and chances are, you’ll be fine.
In 2013, Paul Bosland, a New Mexico State
University Regents professor and director of the Chile Pepper Institute,
announced the results of their international cooperative chile pepper genome
mapping project: “The chile pepper has approximately 3.5 billion base pairs,
which are the building blocks that make up the DNA double helix [homo sapiens
have about 3 billion]. The Human Genome Project determined we have about 20,000
genes. Chile
peppers have about 37,000 genes.”
Bosland then raised a matter worth
pondering: “Whether that means chiles are more evolved than we are, I don’t
know.”
But we do know something for sure:
Everything’s better with green chile.
S.
Derrickson Moore may be reached at dmoore@lcsun-news.com, @derricksonmoore on
Twitter and Tout or call 575-541-5450.
No comments:
Post a Comment