Green chile's are here

"In the olden days..." I could get green chile for .25 a can without a coupon around Cinco de Mayo. Now .40 is about the norm. One of the local grocery chains carries them and roasts them on the weekends. They sell for $1 per pound. The last 3 years or so I have been buying them and freezing them. The flavor is SO much better than out of the can. When the cans are on sale and I have a coupon, I will buy them, but we go through alot of them. We have been out of our own frozen and canned for almost 2 months.

Saturday I finally made it to the grocery chain early enough to get some chile's before they were gone. They sell pretty quickly once they are done. I bought 30 pounds.

Each bag is just over 1 pound. I have never weighed them or counted how many chile's were in a pound before, but S needed something to do so I found something. We averaged about 15 chile's per bag.

Once they are roasted and blistered, they go into the bag to sweat. By the time they get home, the blistered skin peels right off. I pick off the end and remove the seeds with the skin.

In the past I have chopped them by hand, but this year I realized the food processor would probably work really well. I was right. It can chop a pound in 4 pulses.

Next I scoop them with a 1/2 cup measuring cup and plop them onto a baking sheet. Once it is full I put it into the deep freeze until the chile is frozen, at least into slushy otter pop consistency. It just needs to be frozen enough to move without losing its measured shape. This year I vacuum sealed them, in years past I have frozen them completely and tossed them into big ziplock.

I got 43 chile pucks out of the first 15 pounds of chile.
This is what they looked like all nice and packaged. Too bad the deep freeze door got left open and the next morning they were bags of defrosted green chile goo. That is another story.