The Best Roasted Green Chiles come from Hatch, New Mexico

The Best Roasted Green Chiles come from

Hatch, New Mexico – a Tradition in the Desert Southwest

Hatch Diced Hot Green Chilies, 4-Ounce (Pack of 8)

Hatch, New Mexico is a small farming community near Las Cruces. Their Green Chiles are so well known that a regular Chile Festival is held there every year. The Hatch Chile Festival usually occurs around Labor Day.

This event attracts people world wide to a place known as the chile capital of the world. The small town has accommodated up to 30,000 people for this event. This small farming community is known world wide for raising very good chiles.

Where I come from, Chile Rellenos are Comfort Food!

Best Chile Rellenos Recipe Ever

“Roasted Green Chiles stuffed with loads of cheese, battered with an airy egg coating, and fried until crispy equate to the Mexican version of comfort food. Chile rellenos fillings can range from ground or stewed meats to a medley of vegetables, but this recipe sticks to classic cheese. Our spicy roasted tomato salsa is the perfect foil to all of the fatty goodness here, but a Smooth Salsa Verde would also be tasty.” Such a Recipe! Delish

Ahh… all the foods I love. Now I ask, could you resist such a recipe?

“Not I,” says this silly lady with COPD and an oxygen-line pumping 02 into both nostrils. Yea, me, the same Lady who warms ice cream in the microwave so the brain-freeze doesn’t stop her breath (that’s happened a time or two.) Yea, the lady who has a spare toaster-oven in the laundry room, outside, so normal folks can cook delish foods that require more than 350 degrees because an oven radiating more heat than a burning match takes her breath away.

I grew up in the White Mountains of Arizona where a trip to Hatch, New Mexico for Chile Peppers could make my eyes water. It wasn’t sentimental childhood memories with Mom and dad and my two brothers, but rather the heat from Chile peppers wrapped in a burlap bag in the car’s trunk that made my eyes pour in a molten stream of tears. “They can’t be that hot,” Mom quipped as she patted my wet cheeks with her hanky and frowned, puzzled.

If I touch them, Chiles from Hatch make my fingers itch like poison ivy before they begin a slow, scalding burn. Then my eyes cry and my nose burns, and a fireless flame steals my breath away. I know that. It happened when I was a child and it happens now.

But if you come from the Desert Southwest, Chile peppers are more than a tradition. If you’re from the Desert Southwest Tortillas and Tamales, Burritos and Tacos, and Sopapillas with Guacamole is more than dinner. It’s a lifestyle.

After hubby and I had our own family (2 daughters/2 sons) our boys would turn red-cheeked and sweaty before they’d turn down a pepper-eating contest with their Dad. There were no “sissies” in our family. Being competitive was a virtue; even the girls gave it a try though they never sweated enough to win.

In the beginning, hubby always won. But revenge was sweet by the time our sons entered their 30’s. By then, hubby had lost more pepper-eating contests than he’d won, and they didn’t let him forget it easily either. Revenge is sweet.

#1 Son especially loves red-hot chili peppers along with agitating his old man. Now he has acquired “the taste” and can pop the Green Chiles like peppermints, the hotter the better.

A couple months back, #1 Son’s plumber/buddies made a trip to Hatch, NM. When they returned with their bounty, everyone in the office got a generous bag full of Hatch’s hottest Green Chile Peppers and, of course, that meant a pepper-eating contest and feast for our family.

I received the cooking privileges. And no one, including me, considered COPD’s part in this heated food fest around our stash of Hatch Green Chiles!