Day Two

The smart move would have been a mid-week grocery run after Hyperbole the Weather Dude told us we were going to get hit by the storm. The smart move would have been investing in a snow shovel and a pair of moon boots each, and gloves. Holy crap, dudes. Gloves.

But we didn't make a mid-week grocery run, and we don't have a snow shovel or moon boots or the rest of it.

And while it might make you Northerners laugh, we admitted defeat. 11" of snow FTW. Seriously, I haven't seen this much snow in ten years. Adam's only seen this much snow one other time in his life.

"Yeah," he said, doing the dude-surveying-his-domain-fist-on-hips stance. "We're stuck. At home. Again."

Not that there's any problems with being stuck at home while the world's draped in eleven inches of fondant. Staying at home means lounging around in my fluffy robe and fluffy slippers and fluffy monkey pants (I like being fluffy) and reading Christopher Moore books while Adam rocks out with Guitar Hero II. Staying at home means I will make breakfast, grilled cheese and jalapeno sammiches, oatmeal raisin cookies and stew. and I'll still clean up the kitchen. And staying at home means getting bored around two o' clock and deciding yeah, it's time to build a snowman.



Or, um, Snow Jabba in our case. We're nerds, but we've established this.



Really big nerds.



Really, really big nerds.

And now we're going to spend the evening lying around the living room coming up with Old Years Resolutions, because it's easier to come up with something you have one day to fix than the other way around. For instance, I'm going to do laundry.

Ahhh, I feel better already.

Labels: adam, albuquerque, nerdom, snow, snow jabba

I give Adam the same piece of hell daily. That is, I very much enjoy reminding him (neener-neener) that while my family's been parked in New Mexico for generations, he suffered the indignity of being born in Kansas.

Neener-neener.

Seriously. This is the one upper hand I've got. I'm as native as you can get (post Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo) and he's . . . well, he's from Kansas.

This is an especially fun game because his parents moved to Albuquerque before he was out of diapers and New Mexico is all he's known. For all intensive purposes, he's a New Mexican through and through; it's just that pesky detail of not being born in the 505 that gets his goat every single time.

So I like to mutter things like "Kansas" and watch the vein in his forehead throb and he likes to counter by proving just how New Mexican he really is. He does this by full embracing the gift of our cuisine.

He was well on his way when I met him a zillion years ago. He was rocking the same chile addiction every other New Mexican has; green chile was slopped onto burgers and eggs and tacos without thinking, the hotter the better. Salsa was used in lieu of ketchup. Traveling outside of the state, he would whimper for Tobasco (handy in a pinch and widely availible).

But then last fall, one of his co-workers brought in fresh chile from his chile garden and Adam decided to make salsa. And I know I've posted pictures upon pictures of his weekly salsaings, but pictures do not begin to convey the quality of his salsa. Spicy and tasty and hot and delicious. His salsa is some of the best I've ever tasted, and I'm not just saying that because he's sitting six inches to my right. The man can make salsa.

From there, he branched into guacamole. And then enchiladas and fajitas and rellenos. Suddenly it was fall again and we had two bushels of chile spread across two freezers and it doesn't seem to be enough. Chile has turned from a preference to a hobby to an obsession.

No, that's an understatement. It's not just the chile. I do believe his quest in life is to make the entire Gardunos' menu from scratch and to make it better. Right now, all we need to do is to attempt bizcochitos and tamales for Christmas, and we'll be set, which is really a subtle, show-off-y way of saying that today we made our own tortillas and sopapillas from scratch.



If you go into Flickr, you'll see all the notes. Believe me, they're silly enough to look at.

Also, I'm too tired to figure out how to tie this into the narrative, so I'll just straight-out pimp this. If you want a piece (heh) of the Wolf chile crazy, check out his mother's block-of-the-month Chili Sampler quilt. You should totally buy it. You should also totally buy one for every other person you know. It is one of the most creative quilt designs I've ever seen and it was thought up by my mother-in-law, which makes it that much more awesome, and also, it's chile. Did I mention that part?

Labels: adam, albuquerque, chile, food, new mexico