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Friday, October 14, 2005
This Saturday: Get Your Roasted Organic Green Chile
From the SouthWest Organizing Project:
SWOP Chile Harvest Fiesta October 15 -- Our Annual Chile Harvest Fiesta is here -- Please Join Us! Saturday October 15; 1:00-4:00 PM; Washington Park, at 10th and Park SW in downtown Albuquerque. We’ll have entertainment, children’s activities and a Green Chile Stew Cook-off! And, of course, we’ll be roasting Chile!
Reserve your bag of Organic Chile *now* and pick it up at the park. Bags of Chile are just $25. We have a limited supply so give us a call ASAP at 247-8832 to reserve your chile. We hope to see you on the 15th!
From an Albuquerque Journal article on SWOP's Chile Fiesta:
"This year's chile is fantastic," project organizer Joaquin Lujan said. "I'm so excited about it. I've looked everywhere for a good supply of organic chile grown in New Mexico and I found it."
This year's chile was picked at Manuel Apodaca's farm in Cuchillo, N.M., about 12 miles northwest of Truth or Consequences.
"His farm is irrigated with artesian spring water and the chile crop is amazing," he said. "Chile is a way of life to most New Mexicans. By mid-October, the green chile season is over and the red chile season starts. This is a celebration to prepare for the coming winter and it pays homage to what we hold dear."
October 14, 2005 at 09:18 AM in Events | Permalink
Comments
See that photo of chile I had to share this poem from one of New Mexico's best:
Green Chile
by Jimmy Santiago Baca
I prefer red chile over my eggs
and potatoes for breakfast.
Red chile ristras decorate my door,
dry on my roof, and hang from eaves.
They lend open-air vegetable stands
historic grandeur, and gently swing
with an air of festive welcome.
I can hear them talking in the wind,
haggard, yellowing, crisp, rasping
tongues of old men, licking the breeze.
But grandmother loves green chile.
When I visit her,
she holds the green chile pepper
in her wrinkled hands.
Ah, voluptuous, masculine,
an air of authority and youth simmers
from its swan-neck stem, tapering to a flowery
collar, fermenting resinous spice.
A well-dressed gentleman at the door
my grandmother takes sensuously in her hand,
rubbing its firm glossed sides,
caressing the oily rubbery serpent,
with mouth-watering fulfillment,
fondling its curves with gentle fingers.
Its bearing magnificent and taut
as flanks of a tiger in mid-leap,
she thrusts her blade into
and cuts it open, with lust
on her hot mouth, sweating over the stove,
bandana round her forehead,
mysterious passion on her face
as she serves me green chile con carne
between soft warm leaves of corn tortillas,
with beans and rice - her sacrifice
to her little prince.
I slurp from my plate
with last bit of tortilla, my mouth burns
and I hiss and drink a tall glass of cold water.
All over New Mexico, sunburned men and women
drive rickety trucks stuffed with gunny-sacks
of green chile, from Belen, Veguita, Willard, Estancia, San Antonia y Socorro, from fields
to roadside stands, you see them roasting green chile
in screen-sided homemade barrels, and for a dollar a bag,
we relive this old, beautiful ritual again and again.
------
From Black Mesa Poems by Jimmy Santiago Baca, A New Directions Book
Posted by: slammer | Oct 14, 2005 4:45:15 PM
