Chili Verde

Good food and good times go together like bread and butter. It is a fact of life that even modern science cannot find grounds to refute. When one is ill, one wants comfort foods, when one is happy one wants party foods, and when one grows just a bit homesick, one wants home food. Yesterday, wandering around in the cold, watching the snow geese, staring at frozen rivers and, looking at the weather report that calls for a week of snow, we began to miss home. And we realized that it had been a long time since we had one of the meals for which the Master and Mistress of Swampwood are famed. As we are separated by more than a thousand miles at the moment, it was necessary to make do with what we could scrounge up. Chili Verde.


After calling up the Master of Swampwood to ensure that the result of our efforts would not be terrible, the Commodore began by burning the skin off of the peppers. This is a fragrant task, to say the least, and within seconds, Tallulah was filled with the spicy smell of burning peppers, after which these same peppers were carefully skinned. Then the Commodore had to taste them. It is not often that the Commodore is outdone by a pepper. She has a fairly heat tolerant mouth, and usually she can at least fake a smile until she gets something to drink. I do not think it is very much to the crew’s disgrace that we had a bit of a chuckle as we hastily handed our bold Commodore the cheese and crackers that she begged for. In went the pepper, which somehow grew tamer during the process. In fact, even the Admiral ate the finished product.


And when the supper was finished, we sat down to eat. The food did not really taste like the food we get when we are at Swampwood, but it was good enough. By the time we finished eating, we were not so homesick, and today, the sun even came out.