We like a new culinary adventure now and then.
It might be trying to make crab ravioli from scratch or making a salsa from tomatoes out of the garden and seven different kinds of peppers. It could be trying out the newest herb combination product at the grocery store or figuring out how best to use the cilantro-flavored sour cream you can find now. Or it could be spending an entire day making Bobby Flay’s German chocolate cake recipe (which I highly recommend if you’ve got that kind of time).
Food needs to be kept interesting or it just becomes blah.
That is the only explanation I can come up with for bringing home a bag of green chile powder from a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, last month. Little did I know that I could weaponize it.
Santa Fe is known for many things, but it’s world-renowned for its art and its cuisine. You also could say that New Mexican cuisine also has become an art form of its own.
It is addictive, particularly if you like a little spice in your food. It has heat, absolutely. It’s the kind of heat that makes me want to keep taking bite after bite until I feel like I’ve just finished Thanksgiving dinner, which means it’s a good thing that I don’t live there.
But we wanted to bring a little bit of that heat home with us. That was the idea behind the green chile powder.
We were buying chile ristras to bring home — those dried red chiles braided onto a string or formed into a wreath — and watched as the same vendor took fresh green chiles from a gunnysack and dumped them into big tub and roasted them for another customer. Those roasted chiles are the basis for much of the Santa Fe cuisine.
There, people buy them by the gunnysack, roast them and freeze them. It isn’t unusual for them to have multiple freezers full of nothing but green chiles that Santa Fe residents consume until the next crop is ready.
We lamented the fact that we couldn’t bring home a gunnysack full of them.
“Ahh,” said the vendor. “I have something for you.”
He dug out a pint-size plastic bag full of pea green powder.
“Sold,” said my husband, who, you must understand, thinks he likes ghost peppers. I don’t think there’s any possibility that “like” and “ghost peppers” can be used honestly in the same sentence.
He doesn’t believe that “like” and “chicken” can be used in the same sentence, but he was willingly to give it a try as long as the green chile powder could be part of it. He rubbed some onto the chicken breasts and put them in a scorching hot skillet to sear them, trying to make a combination New Mexican green chile/Cajun blackened flavor, I guess.
The smoke nearly killed him. He coughed and hacked until he was forced to open a window and blamed the hot skillet (and of course the chicken).
Ever the supportive sous chef, I tried to appreciate the chicken later, but it really wasn’t very good.
But also ever the hoarder of cooking supplies, I found myself a few days later trying to figure out what to do with the bag of green powder. I finally settled on emptying it into a mason jar so that the bag wouldn’t be torn open inadvertently.
I placed a funnel over the jar and poured in the powder, which has the consistency of flour. A cloud of powder poofed up from the jar.
I coughed, I sneezed, I hacked, I cried. I couldn’t breathe.
I thought I was going to die, or that at least I needed medical attention.
I realized I had just inhaled the equivalent of pepper spray. Our “special” chile powder could clear a crowd.
We can’t wait to try it in our next culinary endeavor — an adventure indeed, but never blah.