Making chili paste

Time to make chili paste! You can’t make good mexican food without it. We imported dried chilis especially for this purpose. One big bag of dried New Mexico chilis and one smaller bag of pasillas. I know in the past we have also used ancho chilis. C is wearing the plastic gloves, for the faint of skin, because your hands can get irritated from the capsaicin. Just slice open the dried chili, take out the seed and ribs (we save the seeds and occasionally sprinkle them in certain dishes — mostly at a whim), then soak them in warm water for about an hour. Then grind them to a paste in a blender or food processor. We actually bought a new blender specifically for this task, having left our really nice blender in the US along with the rest of our kitchen appliances. So, we loaded it up with soaked chilis, only to discover that it didn’t work! Frantically, I ran upstairs to our neighbors and asked to borrow their blender. This is not a popular appliance here, and he only recognized the word after I said “You know, to make milk shakes.” He said they only had a food processor, so I borrowed that. It worked great. I’ll have to get one of those some day… Anyway, after you paste the chilis, freeze the paste in ice cube trays and pop ’em out into a bag and they will keep in the freezer for a really long time. We had one big batch for 18 months!

One or two cubes with a pound of meat (we prefer ground turkey), a can of chopped tomatoes, some chopped onion and garlic, some cumin, oregano and salt… yum yum tacos, nachos or burritos! Half of a cube with a little cinnamon, sugar and some chocolate and cream enough to make it fluid makes a fantastic chocolate-chili sauce for plantains. Mmmm…

C Max is excited about the plastic gloves! And it looks like that frog shirt is getting a little too small (but it’s one of his favorites, thanks grandma Wendy!).

Chris and Johannes are starting the chili cleaning and de-seeding process. After which we will grind up the chilis in the blender to make the paste.

C says “Look Johannes, plastic gloves!”