Don't Get Perconel With a Hatch Chili!

I was intrigued by a display of attractive multi-hued chili peppers in a local grocery late last week, something a bit out of character or even a little outre way out here in the (formerly) soggy northwest, far from chili-dom. I noted the name but otherwise decided it was not urgent business. But a couple days later I ran across a similar display in another branch of this chain. Hmmm!

In passing, I shared this with co-worker food-confabulist political-poltergeist that the domestic crew have come to tease me as having recently morphed into my BFF. I have been careful over the years (a shared 17 or so with same employer) to tiptoe around his sensitivities or more specifically his delight in throwing out caustic right-wing barbs. He's a gun-toting (in the National Parks before it was legal!), motorcycling, government-fearing posse all to hisself when it comes to outward politics. It's tough to overcome a deprived childhood and a child-less marriage.

Despite his wholly misguided politics, he is somehow a devoted vegetable gardener (exploiting the now-illegal pesticides he has archived), amusingly devoted cat-lover, and an enthusiastic meat-smoker and food afficionado with a self-admitted decidedly limited Kansas-based set of food preferences. But he does do spicy food amazingly well, all things considered.

And he has a lot more hours logged on food websites than I do, so "Hatch chilis" actually meant something to him. These are apparently quite the gourmet item, a subset of New Mexico green chilis raised in small area around Hatch, NM. We mutually puzzled over how or what these chilis would be used for, in my case having only the coincidental connection that they were being promoted (lacklusterly) locally, in his case limited as he'd never imagined encountering them.

I took time Friday to re-visit store, despite crises enveloping me at work (or maybe to escape same?), only to find that said chilis had been tossed due to spoilage. But in the course of the weekend, amusingly, we both found other supplies, and purchased extra on each other's behalf! Interestingly his were all green and came in two separate heat levels, while mine were multi-colored with no news on capsaicin levels.

With provendor in hand, more on-line research suggested to me that roasting these puppies and preserving was the way to go.

I went the oven-broiler route, though slower oven-roast would no doubt work too, and BBQ and/or smoker are other options. I cut mine in half to simplify seed and membrane removal, a little wary of possible heat. But removal of relatively tough skin was made more difficult as a result. I found it quite a chore to peel the little darlings.

It turns out that my catch is not really all that hot, though I guess medium-spicy. I packaged the peeled peppers 1/2 cup each and vacuum-sealed them for freezing. I foresee use in an authentic chili when the winter is upon us. Or some enchiladas. We'll just have to see. Co-worker expended most of his catch into a potato-chili soup recipe he had been dying to try and was swooning over that today (while admitting it did have some serious tang to it).

And, by the way, in the spirit of learning something every day, there was a lesson here. Though one any food-savvy dolt might not need my help with. When working intimately with the pepper family, in particular the membranes and seeds, not only is it important to observe the normal food-work guidelines of washing after a visit to the loo, it is highly recommended that you do a vigorous scrub before contact with genitals also. Speaking only hypothetically, hours of discomfort could burn this lesson in well.

In the meantime, I tracked down another couple pounds or so of Hatch beauties and have them cooling in the kitchen now.

PS Title is a nod to a book I wore out in younger days, authored by quirky author H. Allen Smith ("Don't Get Perconel With a Chicken"), who was also famed for being one of the progenitors of chili-cooking competitions in the Lone Star State.

The CIGNA/AETNA Death Panel Program: Profits Before People

We're all of course being victimized these days by the established mega-medical-insurance-Congress profiteering complex. Many of our citizens are victimized because they do not even have access to the sort of "socialistic" plan that involves pooling folks together for the combined good and thus achieving program costs that could even be marginally affordable (health care plans through large employers are a good example of this sort of "socialized" health insurance, as are medicare and medicaide). And of course there is that congressional elite in DC that not only has a "platinum" health care plan beyond anything we can imagine, but is also constantly in receipt of (with a very few exceptions) what amount to bribes from the mega-insurors and pharmaceutical giants and the like.

But even those who do have some coverage (routinely miserly by comparison to their Senators and Representatives, many of whom are desperately fighting to keep the folks they "represent" from getting what they have) are regularly victimized by propaganda issued by mega-insurors like CIGNA and Aetna. Because of this propaganda their chance for future improvements in health care insurance (not to mention the actual quality of their health care, on average in this country tawdry by first-class country standards) is at risk because of the millions of dollars being spent by these profit-before-people organizations on "lobbying" (i.e., buying the votes of) the all-too-human but not-human-representing congressional representatives in DC.

The bottom line: we're being cheated, swindled, and lied to by these huge insurors and the congress they own. Nothing short of a strong Public Option, where our government basically acts as the insuror, is going to even come close to changing this. Co-ops have little promise of even making a difference on the scale we are talking about. "Triggered" public options are a total con-job - Conrad should be ridden out on a rail or, better, tarred and feathered for a ruse that is unspeakable.

But if you are reading this, you probably know a good bit of this or more. Thank you for your indulgence.

I'm doing some rearranging here of an interesting post at the Latest Breaking News page at the Democratic Underground website:

Newly revised estimates from Citizens for Tax Justice show that the Bush tax cuts cost almost $2.5 trillion over the decade after they were first enacted (2001-2010). Preliminary estimates from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office show that the House Democrats’ health care reform legislationis projected to cost $1 trillion over the decade after it would be enacted (2010-2019).

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And then there is this great graphic from that post, deserving of considerable study:























Of course anyone with an actual brain-body connection probably has known this all along, but talk about "graphic!"

The post goes on to remark:

Citizens for Tax Justice point out what I was saying just the other day: We only hear all this crying and moaning about the deficit when it's something for regular working people, and not a powerful lobby.

And of course, the Republican'ts are right out there in front of the Hypocrisy Parade:And yet, many of the lawmakers who argue that the health care reform legislation is “too costly” are the same lawmakers who supported the Bush tax cuts.

Their own voting record demonstrates that health care reform is not a matter of costs, but a matter of priorities.

It’s difficult to see how the Bush tax cuts could provide us with two and a half times the benefits of health care reform. In 2010, when all the Bush tax cuts are finally phased in, a staggering 52.5 percent of the benefits will go to the richest 5 percent of taxpayers.

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And Andrew Leonard at Salon has some interesting quite-relevant observations on how things have changed on the economic front in the last couple years, well worth reading in full:

The sudden present-day prominence of John Maynard Keynes, an economist who passed away 60 years ago and whose theories have been mercilessly ridiculed by conservatives for at least three decades, calls to mind the famous 1981 Rolling Stone magazine cover story on the Doors' Jim Morrison: "He's Hot, He's Sexy, and He's Dead."

We've witnessed quite the turnaround. From at least the 1970s on, Keynes' star was in eclipse, while Milton Friedman and the free market theorists of the Chicago School of Economics seized the commanding heights of economic discourse. To even mention Keynes was to be dismissed as hopelessly out of touch with state-of-the-art theory. Hadn't you heard? The government governs best when it governs least!
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And yet today, you can't click your way three links through the econoblogosphere without stumbling into a flame war between reenergized triumphalist Keynesian supporters of government intervention in the economy and bewildered, angry market fundamentalists who have just watched their painstakingly constructed world crumble around them. Just a few years ago the heat of the debate would have been unthinkable -- Keynes seemed to have about as much relevance to current economic policymaking as Winston Churchill does for the Middle East peace process.

But global economic crises that obliterate the notion that markets are intrinsically self-correcting and efficient have a way of shaking things up. As the University of Chicago's Robert Lucas (who most explicitly does not fall in the pro-Keynes camp) said last October, "Well I guess everyone is a Keynesian in a foxhole ..." Meaning, basically: When shit happens, people want help. And since Keynes is the most illustrious proponent of the idea that government should help get economies back on track when they ride off the rails, his reputation is on the serious upswing.

Few people are better situated to comment or explain Keynes' current fashionableness than Lord Robert Skidelsky, author of the newly published "Keynes: The Return of the Master" -- which comes complete with the possibly overdone sub-headline: "Why, Sixty Years After His Death, John Maynard Keynes is the Most Important Economic Thinker for America."

Skidelsky has devoted the bulk of his creative life to Keynes. He spent decades producing a three-volume biography of the economist that won numerous awards and has already been abridged once -- into a merely 1,000-page tome! The new book, clocking in at a slender 220 pages (including notes), is thus a distillation of a distillation, shoehorned onto the recent economic crisis. Ironically for an author who spent so many years laboring over his definitive account, "The Return of the Master" feels a bit hasty, written as if with one eye focused on the headlines and Paul Krugman's latest blog post.

But that's OK. There is nothing awkward or opportunistic about speedily resurrecting Keynes in the wake of Wall Street's implosion -- it is, on the contrary, entirely appropriate. Keynes would not be surprised at the mess we are in today. While so many leading economists failed to predict or even conceive of the possibility of market failure on such an enormous scale, Keynes wouldn't have blinked an eye. One of his fundamental propositions was that the future was inherently unknowable, that we live in a constant state of "irreducible uncertainty." Shocks, depressions and recessions are bound to happen. The question is: What to do about them?

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