Roasted chiles...

One waits all year for the fellow from Hatch, New Mexico to come round to our small town with his truckload of chiles. He comes three weekends in a row and sets up a roaster by the side of the road. This contraption looks to be made of a steel drum cut length-wise in half, which is rotated above a propane-fuelled fire. He doesn't like to sell half bushels so we splurge on the full satchel, which weighs about 20 lbs., later passing off the extras among friends and neighbors, after skinning, de-seeding, bagging and freezing about half for ourselves.

There are already a number of cars parked and people standing in line when we arrive. An older woman, perhaps 70, asks if I will make tamales. I tell her I haven't yet learned but once helped a friend. I asked her if it is very hard to prepare the masa, as I had heard that it must float in a glass of water to be just right (another friend wrote an entire poem in fact on the subject). She said no, no, you must use lard and pat it into the corn meal so that it doesn't stick to your hand. Also she said only the finest part of the corn is used for the masa.