Our first frost is expected tonight. I’ve spent the majority of the past two days preparing for this. I have harvested the last of the tomatoes, and some green tomatoes;1 I have brought in mounds of thyme to dry. Chris got all the cardoons in last night, and we carried all the plants in pots that can’t withstand the winter outside to the shelter of their winter home. I have scoured the yard for squashes; we hardly ever plant squash, but we always have a lot of volunteer squash plants, so there are always squashes in strange places to harvest.2
The cold north wind started this afternoon. I stopped digging up celeriac for a few minutes and watched golden leaves from our neighbor’s aspen grove come floating into our yard on that wind. I can feel the frost in the wind already, although for now the temperature is still above freezing. Today, this year’s winter became palpable. It will not surprise me if we wake up to snow in the morning, but the snow might be a day or so more away, too. We can see it coming down the mountains. Once the snow comes, we’ll still have kale, Brussels sprouts, and parsley out in the garden; they’ll stay out there for a while longer yet, until the ground is ready to freeze.
For lunch, I came in and heated up last night’s green chile stew. I had put it in the crockpot yesterday, in order to have it ready for dinner after a day of harvesting and cleaning up the garden. For lunch, I made some cornbread to go with it. It’s good to have such a warm, rich meal at the ready for this first day of cold.
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When someone asks what my favorite food is, I always struggle to answer, in much the same way that I struggle to answer what my favorite song is, or where I’m from. I have lived too many places to know where I’m from anymore, and I like too many foods and too much music for any answers to emerge when I’m caught off guard.
But when I’m not caught off guard, and I have time to explain, the answer is clear: my favorite food is whatever a New Mexican is cooking in their crockpot. Take beans, hominy, and maybe some kind of meat — from antelope to fatty pork — and put them in the crockpot with a ton of chile, and it’s bound to be delicious. If it’s green chile, we can call it green chile stew; if it’s red chile, we might call is posole, although it has to have the hominy to be posole.3 Probably there will be some other vegetables involved, and some herbs and garlic and that kind of thing, but really no other ingredient is as critical as the chile.
The chile is New Mexican chile. Everyone talks about Hatch chiles, and there’s good reason for that, but in my opinion, chiles from all over New Mexico are good. New Mexican, or Hatch, chiles comprise a few different cultivars; they taste similar to each other, but differ in their heat levels from super mild to quite hot. People compare them to Anaheim chiles, but to me it’s like comparing Brie to Velveeta. The red chile is, of course, just the fully ripened version of the green chiles. The red chiles are sweeter; the green chiles are more vegetal, but I think without the grassy flavors of a lot of green peppers, though that may just be the roasting process covering or altering those flavors.
While red chiles are eaten without being roasted first, in sauces and as dried chiles/chile powder, the green chiles never are. They can be eaten without being roasted first, but we don’t eat them much that way. When it’s chile season in New Mexico, you can go to your local grocery store even and buy a large sack of green chile, and they will take it out to the propane-fueled roaster in the parking lot and roast them for you. I love the smell of the roasting chile, and the people waiting in line to get theirs roasted or simply gathered around to watch and smell. So, always, a lot of what you taste with New Mexican green chiles is the roasted flavors, the smokiness.
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For fresh (or jarred) red chiles, I think Hatch or most other New Mexican chiles are equally good, but for dried New Mexican chiles, including chile powders, I like Chimayo the best. The flavor is more complex and fruity in the Chimayo, and a little more upfront and savory in the Hatch (or San Antonio, or anywhere in southern New Mexico) dried red chile.
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When I was a kid in New Mexico, my mom would buy a lot of roasted green chile during chile season, peel it in big batches, and freeze it in bags or Tupperware containers. Then she would often cook pinto beans with a little onion and garlic, perhaps some (Mexican) oregano, and a lot of green chile. It was convenient because she could load the ingredients in, set the crockpot to cook while she was in class,4 and we would all come home to a hot, nourishing, delicious meal. I crave this still: the earthiness of the broth, the roasted spicy flavor of the chiles. I make it frequently, especially in winter; no one else in the family loves it as much as I do, so sometimes I make a pot and eat it everyday for breakfast until it’s gone.
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Similarly one of the most memorable meals of my life was red chile with antelope meat in it and some homemade tortillas a friend’s mom made for me when I was in high school. Antelope is not normally a tender meat, but it is when you cook it in chile colorado in a crockpot. You eat this like a stew, even though it is only seasoned red chile sauce with chunks of meat, scooping up all the sauce with your tortillas.
Green chile stew, for me, always involves green chiles, potatoes, and meat of some kind, but I’ve made it with every kind of meat you can think of and it’s always good. Venison might be my favorite, but a pork butt is also great, and turkey is still very good. Chicken, even, is fine, if underpowered; chicken doesn’t stand up to the chiles as well as a red meat or pork does. Sometimes I add some beans; sometimes not. I typically put onion, garlic, carrot, (Mexican) oregano, and some kind of corn into the stew as well.5 I always include some amount of tomatoes (canned are fine) as well, but I’m not sure everyone does. The chile can be canned or frozen; sometimes I even use a jar of El Pinto green chile sauce as my base,6 although then I’ll usually add extra green chile, too. It’s a little different every time, depending on what I have and how much garlic I felt like mincing, and that’s fine, that’s how it should be.
For posole, I most often use lamb or pork, but, again, venison and antelope are also great, though obviously much less fatty than pork is. The key ingredients here are red chile sauce, hominy, and meat. I use jarred red chile sauce, because I don’t have access to fresh red chiles up here; there are many good brands, including El Pinto and 505. I also use dried hominy, usually, which I most often buy at a Mexican grocery store near my parents’ house, but sometimes buy from Rancho Gordo. Garlic and oregano are welcome in posole. I know some people who put cumin in it, too, but I do not. Meat, hominy, red chile, salt, garlic, oregano are enough; it will be perfect.
You don’t have to brown the meat or saute the onions first. You don’t have to measure anything. You don’t need to add much water, although add a bit more if you have dried beans or dried hominy in your stew, because they need to hydrate, but the crockpot prevents evaporation so all the liquid from all your ingredients stays in the pot. You just have to relax, feel confident that if you’re putting in a bunch of good things that go well together, balancing the meatiness with the roasted vegetal and spicy flavors of the chile with a little sweetness of carrot and onion, you’re going to like what comes out of the pot. Salt it, of course, do I need to say that? Salt it right from the start, even if there’s beans in it; trust the long, slow cooking process.
All of these are lacking somewhat in acidity, which is easily solved with toppings. Fresh radishes and cabbage are typical toppings, but consider also: curtido, sour cream, corn relish, lightly pickled red onions. Serve with cornbread or tortillas and live with no regrets.
This is the kind of food where writing down a recipe always seems forced and insincere to me. It’s food you learn how to make by eating it and seeing your mom make it, over and over again throughout your young life. It is never going to fit anyone’s idea of haute cuisine. I’m not even saying you might not improve upon our traditional crockpot foods by browning the meat or whatever; you might, but I wouldn’t. On a cold day, you just want to be warmed by the security of your mom having put dinner in the crockpot well in advance of you being hungry. It is more than enough.
Not all the green tomatoes this year. Normally I am pretty assiduous about picking them all, but I’m very tired this year, so some are just going to rot, sorry.
Many of them won’t taste very good to us, and those ones will get fed to the chickens.
My understanding is that the word posole comes, ultimately, from a Nahuatl word meaning corn, so you really have to have the hominy for it to be posole.
My mom started college when I was 5 or 6 years old, somewhere in there. I’m not saying she had me when she 15 or whatever; she went to college a little later in her life than normal.
We dehydrate a lot of sweet corn every year, and this a good use of it. It rehydrates perfectly in the stew.
Or my homemade equivalent, of course.