Tag: green chile

  • It’s the Fair. It’s OK to Eat the Green Chile Cheeseburger.

    It’s the Fair. It’s OK to Eat the Green Chile Cheeseburger.

    The New Mexico State Fair starts this week.

    I have been a few times over the years.

    Mostly for the food.

    I suppose there are rides. Animals. Exhibits. Competitions. Probably all sorts of wholesome things happening that I should pretend are the reason I went.

    But there is food.

    And every year, right around this time, I start paying attention to the news to see who won the competition for the best green chile cheeseburger.

    If the winner is somewhere close enough, I might even think about paying them a visit.

    I say think about it because apparently I have reached the age where driving across town for a cheeseburger requires some consideration.

    But a good green chile cheeseburger can make a convincing argument.

    This year, though, I have been cooking a lot more.

    And eating better.

    So I had an idea.

    Maybe I could make my own green chile cheeseburger.

    A healthy green chile cheeseburger.

    I sat with that idea for a minute.

    And realized it made me feel roughly the same way I feel when somebody says healthy soul food.

    I understand what they mean.

    I appreciate the intention.

    But sometimes I don’t want cauliflower pretending it is something it isn’t.

    We eat some foods because they nourish the body.

    We eat some foods because they nourish something else.

    And sometimes the healthiest relationship you can have with food is knowing the difference.

    I don’t eat green chile cheeseburgers every day.

    I don’t even eat them every week.

    So if I am going to have one during State Fair season, I don’t particularly want a turkey patty hiding beneath a lettuce wrap while I convince myself I am having the same experience.

    I want beef.

    I want cheese.

    I want a toasted bun.

    And I want enough roasted New Mexico green chile that there is absolutely no question about where this burger came from.

    One won’t hurt.

    It’s the fair.

    So rather than trying to make the healthiest green chile cheeseburger I could, I decided to make the best one I could.

    That started with the beef.

    The Salt, Ink & Soul Green Chile Cheeseburger

    Makes 4 burgers

    For the Burgers

    • 1 pound ground beef, preferably 80/20 or 85/15
    • 4 hamburger buns
    • 4 slices American cheese, Monterey Jack, or your favorite melting cheese
    • 1 cup roasted, peeled, and chopped New Mexico green chile
    • 1 medium onion, sliced
    • Lettuce, optional
    • Tomato slices, optional

    Spicy-But-Not-Hot Burger Seasoning

    • 1 teaspoon kosher salt
    • ¾ teaspoon garlic powder
    • ½ teaspoon onion powder
    • ½ teaspoon mild New Mexico red chile powder
    • ½ teaspoon smoked paprika
    • ¼ teaspoon ground cumin
    • ¼ teaspoon coarse black pepper
    • ¼ teaspoon dried Mexican oregano, crushed between your fingers
    • ½ teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

    The name is deliberate.

    I want the beef seasoned.

    I want some warmth.

    I want that combination of chile, smoke, cumin, and oregano working underneath everything else.

    What I don’t want is so much heat that I can’t taste the green chile.

    There is a difference between spicy and hot.

    This burger is spicy.

    The green chile decides how hot things get.

    Make the Burgers

    Put the ground beef in a bowl and add the Worcestershire sauce. Mix it very gently with your hands, just enough to distribute it.

    Divide the beef into four equal portions and form them into patties about 4 ounces each.

    Don’t work the meat too much.

    This is a hamburger, not a stress ball.

    Combine the salt, garlic powder, onion powder, red chile powder, smoked paprika, cumin, black pepper, and oregano in a small bowl.

    Season both sides of the patties generously.

    Heat a cast-iron skillet or griddle over medium-high to high heat.

    When the surface is hot, add the burgers.

    Leave them alone long enough to develop a good brown crust before flipping.

    While the burgers cook, sauté the sliced onion until softened and browned around the edges.

    During the last minute or two of cooking, pile roasted green chile onto each burger.

    Then add the cheese.

    Let it melt down over the chile and the edges of the beef.

    That little bit of excess is important.

    Lightly toast the buns in the skillet.

    They should pick up just enough beef drippings to remind you that we abandoned the healthy-burger idea several paragraphs ago.

    Build It

    I would keep this fairly simple.

    Bottom bun.

    Lettuce and tomato, if you want them.

    Burger.

    Green chile.

    Melted cheese.

    Grilled onions.

    Top bun.

    You can add mustard if you like. Maybe a little mayo.

    But don’t bury it in sauce.

    A green chile cheeseburger should taste like beef, chile, and cheese.

    Everything else is supporting cast.

    One Won’t Hurt

    Something strange about the way we sometimes approach eating better.

    Once we decide to take care of ourselves, we begin treating every indulgence like evidence against us.

    The cheeseburger becomes a failure.

    The slice of cake becomes a confession.

    The meal we enjoyed becomes something we believe we have to make up for tomorrow.

    I don’t think I want to live that way.

    Eating better most days matters.

    Moving your body matters.

    Taking care of yourself matters.

    But so does sitting down with something delicious and allowing it to simply be delicious.

    No guilt.

    No negotiation.

    No cauliflower standing nearby waiting for an audition.

    The State Fair comes once a year.

    Green chile season doesn’t last forever.

    And if you don’t eat like this every day, then maybe every once in a while the healthier decision isn’t figuring out how to remove everything that makes a cheeseburger a cheeseburger.

    Maybe you just make a really good one.

    Season the beef.

    Roast the chile.

    Melt the cheese.

    Toast the bun.

    Sit down.

    And eat.

    It’s the fair.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

    👉 Resources for Hard Times

  • You Know Fall Is Coming When the Balloons Go Up

    You Know Fall Is Coming When the Balloons Go Up

    I grew up in the Midwest, where fall knew how to make an entrance.

    The trees announced it.

    Green gave way to yellow, orange, and red, as though the whole landscape had decided to burn beautifully before going quiet. Then the leaves began to fall, collecting along curbs and sidewalks, gathering beneath tires, crunching under your feet.

    You didn’t have to wonder whether the season was changing.

    All you had to do was look.

    New Mexico is different.

    Here, fall arrives a little more quietly.

    At first, it is something in the morning air.

    Not cold exactly.

    Just cooler.

    Enough that when you step outside early, you notice. Enough that you remember there will eventually come a morning when you will need a jacket.

    Then comes the smell.

    Green chile roasting.

    If you have lived here long enough, you know the smell before you see the roaster.

    Smoke and chile and flame carried through a grocery store parking lot. Those big metal drums turning over fire while people stand nearby, waiting for bags of roasted chile still warm enough to steam.

    And naturally, there are decisions to make.

    Where are you buying yours this year?

    Who has the best chile?

    More importantly:

    Who has the hot stuff?

    Not the chile somebody politely described as hot.

    The chile that makes you reconsider your confidence about halfway through dinner.

    These are serious questions.

    Or at least we treat them that way.

    And while you’re thinking about chile, while the morning is still cool and the smell of roasting peppers is floating through the air, you happen to look up.

    And there they are.

    The balloons are up.

    I have lived here for years.

    Long enough that none of this should surprise me anymore.

    But I still look.

    I still stop.

    I still reach for my phone.

    I still take pictures.

    There is something wonderfully impractical about a hot-air balloon.

    It doesn’t rush.

    It doesn’t seem particularly concerned about productivity.

    It just floats.

    A splash of color moving slowly across a blue New Mexico sky while the rest of us are down here trying to get somewhere on time.

    Maybe that’s part of why I still look.

    We spend so much of our lives training ourselves not to be impressed.

    We get used to things.

    The mountain becomes the mountain.

    The sunset becomes another sunset.

    The strange and beautiful thing we once stopped to admire becomes part of the scenery we pass without noticing.

    Familiarity can be a kind of blindness.

    I don’t want that.

    I don’t ever want to live somewhere so long that beauty becomes furniture.

    So I take another picture of a balloon.

    Even though I already have plenty.

    Probably too many.

    Maybe that’s all right.

    Growing up, autumn meant leaves.

    Here, it means something else.

    Cool mornings.

    Green chile.

    Balloons.

    Different signs for the same ancient turning.

    And maybe that is one of the quiet things a place teaches you when you stay long enough.

    You arrive with one definition of how the world is supposed to work.

    Then life gives you another.

    You learn that fall does not require red maple leaves.

    Home does not require the landscape where you were born.

    Tradition does not always have to be inherited.

    Sometimes you live somewhere long enough that new rituals begin attaching themselves to you.

    You don’t notice it happening.

    Until one morning you smell chile roasting and think:

    It’s that time again.

    Until you see the first balloons and instinctively reach for your phone.

    Until something that once belonged to somebody else’s place has quietly become part of your own calendar.

    Maybe belonging happens that way.

    Not with an announcement.

    Not with a ceremony.

    Just repetition.

    One season after another.

    One familiar smell.

    One cooler morning.

    One balloon drifting overhead.

    And a person standing beneath it who has seen this many times before—

    and still looks up.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

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  • If You Could Live Anywhere in the World, Where Would It Be?

    If You Could Live Anywhere in the World, Where Would It Be?

    If I could live anywhere in the world, I would still choose Albuquerque.

    And I am proud to say that.

    I know that might sound strange to some people.

    There are places with bigger skylines.

    Places with more water.

    Places people put on postcards, bucket lists, and travel shows.

    But I have lived in different places around the world, and sometimes the place you choose says more than the place you came from.

    I was raised in the Midwest.

    That part of the country has its own beauty. Its own rhythm. Its own kind of strength. But it is also the home of tornado alley, and I learned early that I do not need the sky turning dark and angry above me to feel alive.

    I am not a fan of hurricanes.

    I am not a fan of earthquakes either.

    Yes, I know New Mexico has earthquakes, but not like the West Coast. And yes, we have monsoon season, but to me, that does not compare to the hurricanes of the East Coast.

    The constant rain of the Northwest would be too much for me.

    Some people need green everywhere.

    Some people need water close enough to hear it.

    I understand that.

    But I have fallen in love with the high desert.

    There is something about the open sky here.

    Something about the mountains standing in the distance like witnesses.

    Something about the way the light changes everything it touches.

    Albuquerque has a quiet honesty to it. It does not try too hard to convince you of what it is. It simply is.

    There is beauty in that.

    There is also the food.

    The kind of food that does not feel like decoration, but memory. Food with heat, history, and personality. Food that tells you where you are before anyone says a word.

    Green chile does that.

    Red chile does that.

    A plate here can feel like a map.

    A reminder that place is not just where you sleep at night. Place is what seasons you. What teaches your tongue. What slows your pace. What makes you look up and notice the sky.

    I did not end up in Albuquerque by accident and stay by mistake.

    I chose it.

    And if I had to choose again, I would choose it again.

    Not because it is perfect.

    No place is.

    But because it fits something in me.

    The high desert has a way of making room for a person. It gives you space to think. Space to breathe. Space to become quieter without becoming smaller.

    And maybe that is what home is after a while.

    Not the place everyone else understands.

    Not the place with the best reputation.

    Not the place that looks most impressive from the outside.

    But the place where your spirit unclenches.

    The place where the weather, the food, the land, and the light begin to feel like part of your own language.

    For me, that place is Albuquerque.

    The high desert.

    The mountains.

    The chile.

    The wide sky.

    The quiet invitation to keep becoming.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

    👉 Resources for Hard Times

  • The Land of Entrapment

    The Land of Entrapment

      I was raised in the Quad-Cities — an area that, to this day, feels suspended in amber. It isn’t just the winters that freeze you to the bone, when the wind whips across the Mississippi and leaves your face raw. It’s the people, the rhythm of life, the way the place still breathes as though the 1980s never ended.

    Factories were our backbone then: John Deere, International Harvester, Caterpillar, The Rock Island Arsenal, and ALCOA. Their names were more than brands; they were birthrights. People clocked in and out not just for paychecks but for identity. Houses were bought once and held onto for a lifetime, just like jobs. Men retired in the same overalls they wore when they started, women retired in the same churches and kitchens that shaped them. It was a life that promised stability. Predictability. A bubble.

    But bubbles keep things in as much as they keep things out.

    I had seen time move differently elsewhere — places that reinvented themselves, cities that shifted, people who didn’t cling so tightly to sameness. And once you see that, once you know the world isn’t fixed in place, it’s impossible to believe that standing still is survival.

      I left Iowa more than once. The first time, it was the military that pulled me out — not a choice so much as a summons. Later, work carried me away. And yet, I came back, each time.

    Coming back felt inevitable, like the bubble had its own gravitational pull. But deep down, I knew I couldn’t keep circling the same orbit. There’s a difference between leaving because the world demanded it and going because you chose to.

    That’s what Albuquerque was for me: a choice.

      On paper, the decision made sense.

    No hurricanes to rip through your home. No earthquakes to split the ground. No volcanoes threatening fire. No endless rain to drown the days. It wasn’t Phoenix, where the heat presses against your chest like a punishment. It wasn’t the overcrowded sprawl of the West Coast. It was manageable. It was human-sized.

    And yes — the racial makeup mattered. I wanted a place where diversity wasn’t a buzzword, where the face of the city itself carried the mark of many histories, not just one.

      When I arrived, I heard the jokes: The Land of Entrapment. Come on vacation, leave on probation. They were said with a smirk, half-warning, half-truth. Albuquerque has its shadows. Addiction, poverty, violence — scars on a city that has seen too much. But to stop there, to see only the flaws, is to miss the marrow of the place.

      I didn’t know I liked landscapes until I saw the Sandias burn pink at sunset, watermelon hues spilling across the horizon like the desert itself was blushing. I didn’t know I needed vast skies until I stood beneath them, their sheer immensity forcing me to recognize how small I was — and how alive.

      Then the culture. The way Catholic feast days blur into Pueblo ceremonies, how murals tell stories, how music leaks from church doors and lowriders in the same breath. The way traditions survive here is not as nostalgia but as living practices, stitched into daily life.

    And the food.

      If the Midwest were pot roast and casseroles, Albuquerque is chile — unapologetic, fiery, alive. Chile roasters appear outside grocery stores in September, flames licking metal drums, smoke curling into the crisp air until the entire city smells like memory. Red or green isn’t a question of preference; it’s a declaration of identity. Enchiladas stacked high and smothered, tamales at Christmas, burritos at the Balloon Fiesta — food here doesn’t just fill you, it binds you.

    I’ve said before that I wasn’t raised on green chile chicken enchiladas. I was raised on soul food, or as most people now know it, “Southern Cuisine”. That food was survival dressed as a celebration. It was what you ate to remember who you were.

      But Albuquerque taught me to make room for new rituals. When I’m sick, I still crave soul food, but I’ve learned to crave enchiladas too. I’ve learned that “red or green?” comes as naturally now as “sweet or unsweetened?” once did. I’ve learned that my hands, though clumsy, can roll tortillas and fold tamales.

      Food, I’ve realized, doesn’t erase what you came from. It layers it.

    Iowa was entrapment too — but of a different kind. Entrapment of sameness, of repetition, of a rhythm so predictable it could suffocate.

    Albuquerque’s entrapment is something else. It seduces. It draws you in with Chile smoke in the fall, with the way the mountains change color by the hour, with a culture that makes you feel like you’re walking through both past and present at once.

      People warn you about it: The Land of Entrapment. But I’ve started to hear it differently, not as a warning, but as an invitation.

      Because here’s the truth: I don’t want to leave.

    What began as a practical choice has become something more intimate, something stitched into me. Albuquerque caught me — with its flaws, its grit, its beauty, its food — and I don’t feel trapped. I feel claimed.

    That could be what home is. Not where you start, not even where you end. But where you finally stop running, because you no longer want to.

    By Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • The Taste of Home, The Taste of Here

    The Taste of Home, The Taste of Here

      There are nights when homesickness sneaks up on me. Not the kind that makes you want to book a ticket and run back, but the quieter version — the one that comes when you’re alone in your apartment in Albuquerque and your body aches for food that no one here makes.

      I wasn’t raised on green chile chicken enchiladas. My comfort food wasn’t rolled tortillas smothered in chile sauce, or tamales wrapped in husks and steamed until the masa gives way to tenderness. I was raised on soul food — though these days they like to call it “Southern cuisine,” as if renaming it erases where it really came from.

      I grew up on collard greens cooked until they surrendered, cornbread golden and crumbly, fried chicken with skin that cracked when you bit into it, mac and cheese that clung to your fork like it loved you. Those weren’t just meals; they were testimonies, proof of survival passed down on plates.

    And yet, here I am in New Mexico, learning to find comfort in different flavors.

      When someone offers me tamales now, I don’t hesitate. I ask, “Red or green?” without thinking. At the Balloon Fiesta, I know when I show up, to get in line for a breakfast burrito and a hot coffee to fight the predawn chill.

      I’ve even attempted green chile chicken enchiladas in my own kitchen. I call them “passable,” and that’s being generous. They’re edible, sure, but I know enough to know they don’t hold a candle to the ones made by someone whose hands were taught by generations. Still, they’ve become a ritual. A way of saying to myself: You belong here enough to try.

      Still, when I’m sick, I don’t crave green chile. I crave the food of my childhood. Fried chicken. Collard greens. Sweet potatoes baked down until they bordered on candy. Food that came from a time and a place that shaped me before I even knew it.

      That’s the thing about food — it doesn’t just fill you. It remembers for you. It pulls you back through time, reminds you who held the spoon, who stood at the stove, who called you in from outside when the plates were ready.

      No matter how far you travel, those cravings remain like old ghosts.

    But here’s the surprise: when the homesickness hits hardest, it’s not because I want to return to where I grew up. It’s because I want to return here, to New Mexico.

      That’s the contradiction I live with now. I miss home, yes, but home is no longer the place I left behind. It’s this desert with its endless skies and its Chile smoke drifting outside grocery stores in the fall. It’s the quiet of mornings when the Sandias catch fire with the sunrise. It’s the ritual of learning to love food I didn’t grow up on.

      When I’m away too long, I don’t miss the streets of my childhood. I miss the taste of green chile folded into eggs, the tamales shared at Christmas, the balloon-lit sky at dawn. I miss this place.

      Maybe that’s what it means to belong somewhere new. Not to erase what you came from, but to layer it. To carry collards and cornbread in one hand and green chile enchiladas in the other. To know that your soul food still holds you, but so does this food you had to learn.

    The older I get, the more I realize home isn’t fixed. It shifts. It stretches. It welcomes and demands at the same time. And if you let it, it changes you — until homesickness no longer means going back.

    It means going forward.

    By Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • Waiting for Pumpkin Spice

    Waiting for Pumpkin Spice

    I have a sweet tooth no matter the season.

    If you’ve been following my posts for a while, you already know about my disastrous history with cake — failed layers that sank like bad relationships, frosting that slid off like it had somewhere better to be. Cake and I have an uneasy truce: I respect its existence, but I don’t trust it in my kitchen.

    Pie, though — pie is a different matter altogether.

    Pie is forgiving.

    It doesn’t demand perfection; it rewards patience. It lets you work the butter into the flour until it feels right, and enables you to taste as you go. A pie can be rustic, uneven, a little rough around the edges, and still come out beautiful.

    Fall is the season when pie becomes gospel.

    Pumpkin, of course, with its deep, spiced filling that perfumes the entire house while it bakes. Apple, bubbling over with cinnamon and sugar until it spills onto the oven floor and burns just enough to make the kitchen smell like caramel. Pecan, glossy and rich, is a dessert that feels like a holiday no matter the day. Sweet potato pie, which in the right hands can taste like memory itself.

    This is what I love about pie — that while it bakes, the entire house becomes a sermon about comfort. The smell isn’t sharp or cloying like the sprays you buy in the store. It’s honest. It seeps into the walls, into your clothes, into the way you breathe. It makes you want to put on plaid and furry slippers, sit down with a mug of something hot, and just be still for a while.

      I know Albuquerque doesn’t get many cold days.

    But those few that do come — those rare mornings when the frost laces the windows and the Sandias catch the first light — I savor them. That’s when the heavier blankets come out, when the kitchen becomes a refuge.

    That’s when I want green chile stew simmering on the stove, a pot of pinto beans in the background, and cornbread in the oven. That’s when I make my baked macaroni casserole and lace it with green chile, because everything tastes better with chile when the air is cold.

      If fall is a religion, then chile season is its holiest feast.

    The roasters show up outside grocery stores, filling the air with the sound of the drums turning and the smell of blistering green chile skins. You can’t drive across town without catching the smoke in your nose, without being reminded that it’s time to stock up. Because the fresh green chile sells fast — faster than the weather can catch up.

    Green chile isn’t just for stew. In New Mexico, we put it in everything:

    • Green chile cheeseburgers, smoky and hot, are a state treasure.
    • Green chile chicken enchiladas, stacked or rolled, with a fried egg on top if you’re doing it right.
    • Breakfast burritos, smothered or handheld, are eaten at sunrise with a strong cup of coffee.
    • Rellenos, stuffed and fried until the pepper gives just enough heat to make your eyes water.
    • And yes, even green chile apple pie — sweet and spicy, proof that our chile has no boundaries.

      Some people wait for Christmas.

    I wait for this.

    For chile smoke in the air, for pumpkin spice in my coffee, for pies cooling on the counter, for the kitchen to smell like something worth coming home to. I wait for the few days when I can bundle up, when the air sharpens and the Sandias blush pink, when life feels like it slows down enough for me to notice it again.

    Because fall, for me, is not just a season. It’s a ritual.

    And while the rest of the world counts down to Christmas, I’m here, counting pies, stocking chile, and letting the smell of pumpkin and cinnamon remind me why I love this place, this time, this season.

    By Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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