Green Chili Sauce

New Mexicans love their chilies...and I mean LOVE, their chilies. At this time of year, every supermarket has a roaster running all day, every day, in front of the store, roasting bushel after bushel of New Mexico green chilies (preferably from Hatch, NM -- the Mecca of green chili production in The US) so that everybody has a large supply of chili to get them through the winter and till the next harvest. When we went to Canada last year, there was a palpable sense of panic in our family when we finished our last frozen bag of "extra hot green". We use it most often to make green chili stew (I'll post my version soon) and enchiladas, but by far and away the most common use for green chili is to make green chili sauce -- a kind of gravy -- that is slathered on most New Mexican dishes. Red chili is made out of the more ripened New Mexican chili and provides a different flavour -- smokier and usually not as hot as green chili. An indication of New Mexicans' obsession with chili comes in the form of the official state question: "red or green?", meaning "when your food comes do you want it with red or green chili sauce?". There is an option, usually reserved for tourists and the uninitiated,  called "Christmas" -- a mixture of both red and green -- but this is the quickest way of identifying yourself as "not from 'round these parts". As a family we're all definitely "greenies"...preferably extra hot "greenies" and this is the recipe that we use as our guide. Every family has their way to make "green chili", their own secret recipe, so feel free to adapt this to your tastes. I promise you'll love it, it sparks up almost any savory dish, so I recommend you make lots..it'll disappear.

Name: Green Chili Sauce.

Book: Huntley Dent, The Feast of Santa Fe -- Cooking of the American Southwest (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1985).

Dates cooked:  Too many to list.

Comments: Same as above.
   
Ingredients:  2 Tbs Oil
1/2 small Onion; chopped 1 large Garlic clove; chopped
2 Tbs Flour
1/4 tsp Ground cumin
1/4 tsp Black pepper1 1/2 cups Chicken broth
1 cup New Mexican, Anaheim or Poblano chilies (roasted, peeled and seeded)
           --OR--1 cup  (8 ounces) canned green chilies (chopped)1/4 tsp Oregano
1/2 tsp Salt

  Heat the oil in a 1 or 2 quart saucepan over medium heat. Add the onion and
  garlic, cover and cook over low heat for about 5 minutes to wilt the
  onions. Check halfway through to make sure they are not browning. Raise the
  heat to medium again, stir in the flour, cumin and black pepper, and cook
  stirring, for 2 minutes to cook the rawness out of the flour. The onions
  will tend to ball up into clumps, but that does not matter. When the
  onion-flour mixture just begins to color, remove pan from heat and
  gradually pour in the broth, stiring constantly to prevent lumps. Add all
  the remaining ingredients. Return pan to heat and bring to the boiling
  point, then cover and simmer over low heat for 30 minutes stirring
  occasionally. The finished sauce should be thick enough to nap a spoon. The
  basic sauce is now ready to use or to store in the refrigerator. It keeps
  well for a week or so, but a skin will form on the cooled sauce, and when
  cold it will almost solidly congeal. All can be made right again by
  reheating the sauce as you need it.