Can I Learn to Love New Mexico Chile?

I'm thinking that a month in Santa Fe will present a few opportunities to try green chile.  If memory serves me correctly, New Mexico also boasts the best red chile.  Now to be honest, I have never been a fan of either.  In all the years I've lived west of the Mississippi, I have never requested my dinner be doused in Christmas!  (that's half red/half green for the uninitiated.)

Colorado also has some bragging rights, and many festivals devoted to the part sauce, part gravy, part condiment we know as green chile.  There are many restaurants where I have braved having my eggs or burrito smothered, and I've almost always been sorry that I did.  I like to taste my entire meal; not have it drowned out by mega spice in the first bite.  So many restaurants boast the hottest, the devilish, the best...  and yet I am not a fan.

To be fair, it is not just green or red chile that I don't curry. (food pun intended)  It is just about all Mexican food I encounter.  I can't fathom paying ten or twelve dollars for a plate of mystery meat, bean mush (probably smoothed out with a generous dollop of lard), dried up rice and gobs of cheese.  Even when friends or family assure me I will LOVE the place we are going, I am inevitably disappointed.

Now this sure sounds like a lot of grousing.  I don't discourage the crowd from choosing Mexican as an after meeting lunch, or place to meet for camaraderie and nachos.  But when given a choice, I will not choose Mexican.  Or Tex-Mex.  Or Colorado-Mex.  Not my fave.

Yet a month in New Mexico will surely afford me many chances to redeem the long green pepper.  And I will be fair and give it a few tries... with a few caveats.  Vegetarian only, no pieces of pork.  Nothing that is billed as hair raising, or constitution building.

I'll keep you posted if I convert.



Time to Write,

Jane