Hatch Chile and The Whole Enchilada!

In all the years I've lived in El Paso,
I had heard from everyone who had gone before
that the Hatch Chile Festival was not worth attending.
I should have ignored them, and I finally did ignore them.
In 2006, the year of the great and devastating floods,
Brett and I drove out to Hatch
along with my brother and his family
who had recently moved to Las Cruces.
The festival had to be moved to a different location
due to the city being mostly flooded out
and partially destroyed by all the big rains that summer.
We did not really know what to expect,
but we made the most of what we found there.

I won't lie;
a major disappointment for us was the lack of a beer garden.
The change of venue had created a glitch
in their ability to obtain a license
to serve up that particular brand of "cold ones."
Chile without beer, a travesty, I tell ya!

When we attended the fest in 2007 the beer tent was up
and Diana earned her Designated Driver Badge.
This year the beer garden was missing again,
and we could only speculate that something nefarious had occurred.
Perhaps a father had gone too far
as we witnessed in the parking lot this year,
The elder man slapping down his son
while the family goaded him
and the small children looked on with fear;
their mother screaming all the while.

The deep fried green chile chips
all but made up for the lack of cerveza
(okay, now I really am lying).
This year there was not a fried chile chip to be had.
Typical fair fare was consumed en masse by our little group.
We tried almost everything, all the while noticing...
there weren't really a lot of chile-specific types of foods.
This festival is annoyingly inconsistent.

Why was nobody serving chiles rellenos?
Where's the chile ice cream?

Aha! This year a very cool display of chile ice cream making,
and the sensation was almost perfect; hot and cold, spicy and sweet.
We stressed to this entrepreneur that he should roast the chiles
for that perfect chile flavor,
but he expressed worry about charred bits in the ice cream.
Obviously, the man does not know chile consumers,
but he's got a cool John Deere set-up churning the cream.

While I spoke to the gentleman about his ice cream
Brett managed to break the camera,
so that was the end of photos for today.
We've decided he will be getting a disposable camera
for use on Labor day from here on in.
He broke our last camera on Labor day last year
by driving full bore through a stream in the Gila Wilderness,
soaking me in the process and flooding the camera to its death.

Somebody needs to make a roasted-chile scented candle!
Wait, I read later that someone did just that
but we never noticed, because they weren't allowed to burn it.
Fire laws won't allow them to burn a candle
even while chiles are being roasted non-stop.

We have speculated each year on how we could create
our own chile concoctions and get in
on our own slice of the chile fest pie.
With our collective ideas we'd have the longest line;
we'll slay 'em with our chile-cookin' prowess!
Just you wait and see!


My nieces enjoyed the carnival rides
loads of laughter and whooping it up
these jubilant joy-riders...
spinning in bright silly machines.
Their teenage sensibilities kick in--
finding this festival to be a collosal bore
gives them leave to stay home from now on.
Killjoys, the lot of them!



I gotta say this:
Hatch's Chile Festival leaves something to be desired.
It's such a puny festival in a podunk town.


The town of Hatch is at once beautiful and a little sad.
Oddly, this quiet beauty is exactly what makes it so charming.
Hatch's Chile Festival delivers something
not to be found anywhere else in this great country.

Why do we keep going back?
For the chile, silly.



The Whole Enchilada Fiesta
runs September 25 thru 27 this year.
It's a much larger scale event
with Los Lobos playing on Saturday night
and many bands throughout the days and evenings;
and multitudes of rides and booths to choose from.
We especially enjoy watching the process
of cooking up the World's largest enchilada.
This year, we hope to have Brett's Alaskan nephews
here to enjoy the festivities.
My brother Stan did the T-shirt art again this year.