Red Chile Sauce from 'scratch'

The first snow on the last red chile

My one true goal for the the garden this year has been achieved; I grew everything needed for a batch of New Mexico red chile sauce. A favorite recipe for this NM staple comes not from the Red Chile Bible cookbook, but former Santa Fe chef Mark Miller and his Coyote Cafe cookbook (the current menu at the Coyote Cafe- different owner/chef now-, and the plethora of bad reviews on-line, give little justice to the seasonal and regional recipes in this great book).

Ready for roasting

You start by seeding the red chile pods and dry roasting them at 250 for a couple minutes.  The pods are then simmered in water for 30 minutes.  Roma tomatoes and garlic cloves are blacked over a gas flame, and an onion is sautéed in a little oil.  The now softened chiles are pureed with the tomato, garlic, and onion.  Oregano is always added, but I left out the cumin this time. Up to a cup of liquid is added to the puree-- chile water if it's not too bitter. Finally a ladle full of sauce at a time is pored into a sizzling hot cast-iron pan with beef tallow and stirred constantly for a minute or two.  Using about half of my red chile harvest-mostly sandia and espanola varieties- I happily canned 4 pints of my from-the-ground-up red sauce.  The charred tomato skins and garlic add a savory smokiness to this comfortable winter staple of NM.

El Morro Valley Ranch- 2009 Beef Quarters

Eating high on the 'hog'

Charley Mallery and Rebecca Allina rolled up to Jack’s place in Gallup, just as the sun set last Wednesday, with a gooseneck livestock trailer that still smelled of their grass-fed, organic Black Angus cattle. Animals that now filled the coolers partially-covering the long ribbed floor.

Rio, Charley, and Jack inspect the cargo

They had just driven down from picking up the load of meat, USDA packaged and flash frozen, at Sunnyside Meats in Durango, CO --dry-aged for 3 weeks! A 120-quart cooler, a decent river-trip size cooler (36x21x18”), just barely held the 120 lbs. of frozen beef.  Jack and I, each buying a quarter ($120 lbs. x $4.50/lbs), opted for a couple extra pounds of optional beef liver, and I graciously accepted 25 lbs. of bones to boil into beef stock.

The final resting place for this Black Angus

The quarter was an equal proportion of every cut on the cow and I marveled at the beauty and diversity of the meat, half wrapped in paper, and half in clear plastic shrink-wrap as I filled most of a mid-size upright freezer. The cuts ranged from filet mignon and brisket, to stew meat and ground beef, and everything in between, literally, but no tongue, perhaps that’s in the ground beef. )

Eating lower on the animal

As if their ranch’s growing reputation needed bolstering, be sure to check out the cover photo on the Sept/Oct issue of the Ramah Farmers’ Beet to see Rebecca and Charley’s first-place winning harvest display at the Ramah Farmers’ Market 2009 Harvest Festival. Wow and thanks!

Beckett Roasters: Gallup roasted coffee beans

You’ll soon see his coffee beans for sale around Gallup at places like the La Montanita Co-op and Camille’s Side-walk Café, but the freshest coffee around, roasted daily from green beans, is already available from Travis Smith of Beckett Roasters. Custom roasting on Gallup’s south side, Beckett Roasters sells their broad and growing selection of coffee beans in ¼, ½, and full pound ($4, $7, $12 plus tax) increments. Match your purchase size to your weekly consumption and maximize the recently roasted flavor of your coffee. You can even choose your own level of roasted-ness—Regular City for me. 

Contact Beckett Roasters through their website: http://beckettroasters.webs.com and support the newest addition to Gallup’s local food sources.  Oh ya, the beans, when ground and brewed, make the whole house smell like you’ve been roasting coffee in your own home. 

Gallup-grown Pear and Poblano Chutney

The peppers and pears

The lack of a late spring freeze on the Colorado Plateau this year has led to bountiful fruit harvests all over the region and here in our frosty morning town. And so when a friend dropped off a bushel basket of bosch pears, grown in the Hill/Green region of Gallup, the first preserving recipe that came to mind was a gingery sweet pear and poblano chutney. 

The Gallup Trails 2010 annual party in McGaffey gave us the perfect opportunity to try the recipe on a grand scale. We peeled and peeled and peeled the pears, without a peeler, and then seeded and charred the poblanos over the grill, finally we diced it all with fresh ginger, garlic, red onion, and a few hot peppers from the garden (jalapeno, bird's eye, and thai).  Simmering in white vinegar and brown sugar for 4 hours, delivered a tasty sweet sauce to accompany the banana leaf-wrapped pork shoulders beautifully pit-roasted (fired by oak from 4-7am) for 11 hours by Mike S, Jake G and the GT2010 kitchen crew. Bill's tamed, yet still kicking, habanero salsa puree was said to give the chutney some zing, and in return, the chutney gave some cooling relief from the fiery hot orange peppers. In the end, all the sauces where gone mid-service, and 6 picnic-cut pork shoulders (whole bone and skin), a huge brisket, and two turkey breasts disappeared into the crowd of cyclists and Gallup Trails 2010 member/supporters within an hour. The local home-brewing competition, won by Brian Culligan's #4, washed it all down, and greased the dance floor for the southwest's best bluegrass: The Back Porch Band!

Rhubarb

Rhubarb hugging the rainwater tank

The second Rhubarb harvest of the season is drawing near, the first of which was cutting half of the first vigorous stems in the early spring.  This harvest looks to be the largest yet--a half bushel of 1/2 to 1" stems, some turning red. This is the second year of growing five plants from root stock ($3.95 a plant at Holiday Nursery), all of which are in 3 to 5 gallon pots. The pots bought me time in deciding their eventual placement in the garden, and learned a little more about the water and soil needs of this hardy perennial; they'll go into the corner plots of the waffle garden of perennials where the asparagus roots failed to take.

It took me forever to decipher the tongue-in-cheek mid-western saying of, "think the rain will hurt the rhubarb?"  See, in the arid regions of the world, rain comes sometimes in flooding torrents of rain or hail, damaging many of the large leaves of rhubarb and squash type leaves; Or, I thought, as I had bought these plants as rather dried roots, more slender, but similar to a preserved tulip bulbs, maybe they needed to have a dry dormant period to return vigorously each year? In the end, jokes on NPR's Prairie Home Companion and an old miners account of life high above Telluride, CO gave me more context, and then, growing these beautiful plants for two years now has showed me they love as much water as you can give them. 

The rainwater tank is half-full at 600 gallons, but I'd still love to wink to Racheal during a steady downpour and ask if she thought the rain would hurt the rhubarb.

late season vegetables

Brussel sprouts

The rows of corn, chile, and tomatoes have now been reduced to the rusty orange, tan, and red hues common to our sandstone and coal formations around here, and common to both I guess, they speak to a prior era of lush green growth. Each day now, the more recent palate of those colors sheds a few more rattling dry leaves and reveals the scaly dark stems to the fall winds. A few chile that had matured enough--ripened and red or nearing red--still hang like a NM postcard come to life. Though, many of the fruit, poblano and chile, that were still growing and green by the time of the first freeze, seem to have been irreversibly damaged by the abundant and swelling ice-crystals within their watery cells.  Those chiles are now a pale soggy semblance of their ripened brethren. 

I've digressed long enough in remembering the native vegetable garden behind the house, the aim of this post was the cold favoring vegetables of my front gardens: green onion, radish, chard, collard greens, mixed greens, cabbage (green and purple varieties), broccoli, and brussel sprouts.  Plus a few hardy herbs like mint, rosemary, and sage. 

 

Northern lights chard

These plants benefit from the physical protection and thermal mass of the neighboring houses when the cold dry air begins to snake down Black Diamond Canyon from the mesas to the north; I've found a 2-4 degree temperature differential between the exposed rear gardens and the front gardens.  Though, more than the location of their garden beds, the season-extending benefit of these plants comes from their genetics. The brassica family (e.g. cabbage) seems to be filled with some type of natures anti-freeze.  I'm especially thankful for the longest possible growing season due to the hour or so less of direct sunlight that hits my gardens during the growing season due to the depth and high walls of the narrow canyon, and the under-fertilized clay soil I forced all the under-sized brassicas to grow in this year.

  

Sage and rosemary

Using the biological control NOLO Bait for grasshoppers this year has really improved the appearance of my cabbage and brussel sprouts.  The latter being a favorite of my local grasshoppers; I lost my entire crop of brussels sprouts- three stout plants- to the little creatures last year.

Storage and purple cabbage

Poblano Farewell

Mid-season indication of the bountiful harvest to come

Planted on June 9th as 6" starts I nursed for over a month before planting, sadly, tonight the poblanos are dying as ice crystals swell inside of each watery cell of those beautiful peppers of Mexico--a result of the thermometer plunging into the low 20's. Alas, as they proved to be the most fecund pepper in the garden for a second year in a row; 12 plants yielded 3/4 of a bushel of juicy, broad 3-6" peppers.  

A bee covered in zucchini pollen methodically explores the Poblano flowers

Here in northern New Mexico, perennial Poblanos are doomed to live for only a single year of what could be many in a warmer locale--I had to apologize to the peppers this afternoon as I removed their protective plastic cover and heating lights that had extended their season for an additional week and a half. More than gaining additional growth in the fruit, the cheap cold-frames spread the harvest out over a couple of weeks and made the processes of drying (ancho the name becomes), pickling, and freezing a little more manageable for one.