Chile - Chili - Chilly
Chile . . .
is the fruit of a pepper plant, but you never ask for chile pepper with your meal or even order "chiles". In New Mexico you just order red or green with your meal. Every dish comes with a sauce, and it is either chunky like salsa, smooth and thin like marinara, or something in between. It is either made from unripe green chile peppers or it is made from ripe red ones. There are many, many kinds, some hot, some not.
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| Green chile clam chowder at La Choza |
Chili . . .
is a spicy stew with beans and meat. It isn't served in New Mexico. You can find it on some menus, but it's a Texas thing. Not New Mexican. Don't ask for chili con carne in Santa Fe, ask for beans, maybe with some meat, and "with red or green".
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| Texas chili con carne |
Chile . . .
is a country in South America and there are confused theories on how it got its name. It's a Quechua word for "land beyond" or it's the sound of a native bird call, "chilli-chilli", or it's from a Cacique chief who told the Spanish his name was "Tsili". No one knows.
It's a beautiful place, and an odd one, stretched out over 4,000 miles of coast, up against the Andes. Tom and Zaneta were there last year. They saw flamingos in the Atacama desert with an Incan guide and hiked foggy mountains in Patagonia and went to a fancy upscale wedding in Santiago. The food was excellent but they were not served chile peppers or chile sauce or chili con carne. I think they had a lot of seafood.
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| Chilean sea bass |
Chilly . . .
is what you get when, after endless hot summer days with afternoons in the 80s and 90s, you wake up on September 9 to a coating of snow and damp gray skies and temperatures that never get out of the 30s all day and the heat comes on and roars all day and you can't find the winter socks you stored away last season.
It's still summer. It was summer yesterday and it will be summer until the end of this month. I'm awfully chilly.
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