WombatNation

For several years late each August I’ve wanted to order a big pile of New Mexico green chiles from one of the growers near Hatch, New Mexico, and then make all my favorite green chile-based recipes, especially green chile stew and enchilada casserole. I finally slayed the sloth dragon this year, but with a lot of help from a local grocery store.

First, I did the obligatory Internet research. I found a couple of good options for roasted and frozen green chiles shipped next day or second day air, but the cost was almost too much for me to bear. I really wanted 20 pounds, but that would have set me back anywhere from $150 to $250, depending on shipping. I even checked in with relatives in Albuquerque, but I knew that the majority of the cost was due to shipping. Since none of them own FedEx or UPS, the total cost was going to be very high even if they bought the chiles for me from a local roaster.

My plan this morning was to compromise and order ten pounds online tomorrow. I decided to take one last look online to see if by some odd chance there was a local restaurant or grocery store that had made a huge bulk order and was hoping to find enough chile addicts like myself to take them off their hands.

Luckily, I found a thread on Chowhound about how Raley’s and Nob Hill Foods were selling Hatch green chiles. Even better, they’re selling the chiles for 78 cents per pound for fresh or roasted. That’s an order of magnitude cheaper then what I was about to pay to have them shipped to me.

But it gets better. The new Nob Hill Foods in Alameda was one of the handful of stores that was roasting the peppers in a big roaster.

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I immediately headed over and ordered twenty pounds. Thirty minutes later, a guy wheeled out a shopping cart with a waxed chile shipping box containing a trash bag full of my fragrant chiles. When I got them out to the car I plunged my head into the opening of the bag and inhaled the sweet, smoky essence of roasted chiles.

I bought the medium chiles, which are presumably Big Jims. They also had mild (NM 6-4?) and hot (Sandia?). One caution about the mediums is that they vary from mild to hot. The first one I nibbled on was fairly mild, but the next one was very spicy. If you use a couple in a recipe, though, odds are you will get a nice depth of flavor and spiciness from the blending of the mild with the hot.

Tonight I made a green chile salsa recipe using a recipe from Mark Miller. It tasted pretty good, but I think it needs to sit a little longer for the flavors to blend. As an extra bonus, I managed to peel and seed ten chiles without once reaching up and transferring capsaicin into a tear duct.

If you pick up some chiles and are looking for recipes, check out this other thread on Chowhound and the Bueno Foods recipe page (more than just green chile recipes) for a few ideas.

Maybe a little color blind, but not tone deaf. Or so says a medical research-based Flash application. In fact, I scored 83.3% correct in my guesses careful assessments of the differences or non-differences in tone between two consecutive musical phrases.

From the results page:

The test is purposefully made very hard, so excellent musicians rarely score above 80% correct.

Don’t hate me because I’m musically superior. Hate me because I’m lucky.

I happened to be standing in the bedroom doorway when this last quake just hit. Not that I needed to be there, though, as this was one of the weakest of the five or so noticeable tremors we’ve had in the last year. This one was centered in the same location as the last. The epicenter was near Butters Drive about a mile and a half from our house.

I just checked back at the USGS site and they have now assigned it a 3.2 magnitude, subject to seismologist review. This one had a double bump, but both were fairly weak.

About eleven days ago I had a minor crash on my new bike (the acquisition of said bike remains to be blogged). Fortunately, my bike came out of it with just a few small scratches. That’s because my body cushioned its landing.

I got the standard hip contusion with the attractive purple and yellow bruise that rose to the surface after about a week. The worst damage, though was suffered by my forearm.

Although I was descending at a safe speed and being very careful in the corners, I crashed when I came around a sharp turn and ran over some rocks that had fallen from the hillside and rolled out into the road. My front wheel caught the outside edge of one of the rocks and twisted out from under me. My right forearm came down on and then ground across a rock, carving a small trench out of and a hole into my arm just below the elbow.

Fortunately, I was near the end of a two and a half hour ride with friends, so they followed me the remaining mile or so down the hill to make sure I could make it home. Still, I was hating life, specifically the part where wind blows past an open wound.

I was lucky that my wife was home, so I got help cleaning and bandaging the wound. My nerve endings were already on full alert, so thoroughly cleaning out the dirt and rocks didn’t really increase the pain much. Maybe going from an 8 to a 9. My doctor took a look at it the next day and said I did a good job of cleaning it up.

I’m on vacation now and just visited with my mother for a couple of days. She’s a nurse, so she did a good job of redoing the bandages and making sure my arm was healing. While cleaning it last night with hydrogen peroxide, she found two little rocks that I had been smuggling across state lines. The rocks had been ground in so deep into my arm that it took eleven days for them to come up to the surface.

Of course, when you tell people stories like this, you open yourself up to hearing their stories about bits of glass, ammunition, etc. taking years to come to the surface. But that’s okay. It’s not like I don’t do the same.

Ah, another trip to Biloxi, another series of encounters with the best sandwich in the world, the shrimp po-boy. The first stop on my culinary adventure was the Old Biloxi Schooner, a.k.a., Schooner’s. Once again, they didn’t disappoint. The shrimp was masterfully fried, with a delicious peppered batter. Of course, I had my po-boy dressed, i.e., with shredded lettuce, tomato, and mayo. The soft French roll was stuffed with shrimp. Although it’s more traditional to use a crusty roll, the soft roll employed by Schooner’s also works great. My only complaint was that they didn’t put quite enough lettuce on the po-boy. The accouterments should always be background players, but this was a little too subtle.

Next up, just like on my last trip, was Li’l Ray’s. The quality and quantity of shrimp were also great, and there was a little bit better balance between the lettuce and the shrimp. Li’l Ray’s uses a roll with a much crispier crust.

Finally, on the flight out of Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans my eagle-eyed wife spotted shrimp po-boys on the menu at the Praline Connection, tucked in the back left of a group of eateries on concourse B near gate B5. You gotta like a place that serves a breakfast meal that includes smothered livers and lunch entrees that include fried chicken livers and alligator sausage. At an airport, no less.

The Praline Connection did not disappoint. The po-boy was literally overflowing with shrimp (I almost broke down in tears when two of the shrimp slipped out the end and tumbled to the floor). The lettuce was roughly chopped rather than shredded, but it still worked okay. The bread was a long crusty roll. The only downside is that they put pickles on the po-boy. That’s a sin in my book, but fortunately the pickle slices poisoned only a couple pieces of lettuce that I easily flicked away. $8.95 is a very fair price for a shrimp po-boy. At an airport, $8.95 is a steal for food that good.

I’ve been meaning to try out the JPackage repository for a long time to manage the Java installations on my Fedora Linux installs at home. However, the documentation on the JPackage site is incomprehensible. I don’t see how anyone could possibly use it to install the Sun JDK for use with the JPackage repository with the nosrc rpm. It’s almost like they are daring you to use GCJ, which in my opinion, is a total waste of time. Even the instructions for the compat rpms are overly verbose.

Fortunately, I found some documentation for installing Java on CentOS. CentOS is a free-of-charge distribution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that we use for our production servers at Voxify. Since Fedora is cut from the same cloth as RHEL and CentOS, I was hoping the instructions would work with minimal change, and I was right. A million thanks to the people who wrote that document.

I was able to follow the directions exactly as written, except for the need to first install libXp ($ sudo yum -y install libXp) and to change the 11 to 12 in the file references for the JDK, since the newest Java 5 distribution is now 1.5.0.12.

The Java 6 install is even easier, although it uses the compat rpm instead of the nosrc rpm. From my perspective, though, using the compat rpm is worth it for the time it saves.