Never Again

Chiles Rellenos

Next year, Steepmeadow will not be producing ancho/poblano peppers in any quantity, given the nightmare of this past Saturday afternoon. Neither will new flower bulbs be purchased and planted.

Certain Sisyphean tasks need to be completed in the garden/yard in the fall. 

A steady plod through the earlier part of the month has got us pretty close to complete in preparing the beds (so many beds...) for next year.  

 It is a good thing we started early, as the temperatures have plummeted. As I type this on an early Monday morning, it is 28 degrees and feels like 17, with a light, 13 mph gale-force zephyr blasting from the NNW. 

Yesterday (Sunday) and Saturday were not much better, but necessitated a lot of time outside. 

Kiki spent the better part of Saturday morning in the bitter cold sinking bulbs into the rock hard ground, breaking a dibber at one point. We've been here three years, and for three years bulb planting has happened on a bitter cold day in October. No matter how pretty the flowers in a winter seed catalogue, this ordeal Kiki has sworn off for the coming year.

I got the garlic bulbs planted on Saturday in the relative warmth of the afternoon. Next year's crop will be a little more conservative (one of the small 4x4 beds), but, ideally, much more productive. We're going to try growing marigolds as the succession crop. Hopefully, they will be small when the garlic is ready to harvest, and make a nice pollinator haven for the later summer. Planting with tomatoes did not work swimmingly this past season.

I also did a lot of time plodding the front yard with the lawnmower picking up leaves. It's a bit early (the trees are still nearly full of leaves) to start mulching, and we need them for garden mulch next year and brown compost. So it involved a lot of collecting in bags. When I was finished, I took a nap. When I woke up, the yard looked almost the same as it had before I started. 

But the greatest debacle of the weekend was the attempt at chiles rellenos. Ever since planting ancho/poblano peppers in quantity last February (much too early), the idea of making this dish has been back of mind. Well, we had to harvest them all before the first frost, so we had a plethora of them.

The first warning sign should have been the number of ingredients. The second, the number of steps involved. The third - why would we ever consider something that involved "shallow-frying" in huge quantities of oil? 

The first step (pictured above) involved blackening the skins of the peppers on the grill. As vegetarians, we only have a minimal grill that I cook meatless patties on occasionally. It doesn't have a cover. In the summer; no problem. With a cold, howling wind; problem. It took forever. 

Then there was the first gross part: scraping the char off the peppers to expose the slimy green stuff beneath. Then there was the considerable effort expended on the filling. And then the large number of eggs to make the batter to coat them with (my dear). Sewing them up after stuffing them, like rocks in a wolf, with toothpicks was another thankless task. 

But the worst was yet to come. The oil got heated up, filling the kitchen with a nasty, fishy stench. In went the peppers, shooting hot grease all over the stove and sending a couple errant, searing drops onto Kiki's hands. 

At last, the delicacy was ready to eat. We sat down for a first bite and a big disappointment. They were "meh." All that effort. The whole house reeking of vegetable oil. Every surface in the kitchen covered with dirty dishes, the grill needing to be cleaned outside. 

We ended up with a monumental cleaning task on our hands. We opened the windows wide, cleaned and sanitized every surface, mopped the floor, vacuumed the carpets - even used the wet carpet cleaner on the one in our bedroom to banish the stench - and burned thick Nag Champa incense. In the end, there was still a faint odor of frying.

So a lot of "never agains" this weekend.