Mother

And I don’t mean in a parental sense.

I have been looking forward to this visit to New Mexico for several weeks because of, well, hatch chilis. I can still see and taste the tortilla cheeseburger 1 I had in Farmington, NM from the Deli Factory in 2009, unfortunately, the place has long since closed down.

If you know New Mexico or live there, every restaurant has a version of a green chili cheeseburger, even the national burger chains add one to their menu and some are actually rated fairly high on some lists. Today for lunch Santa Fe Sally took me to her favorite place in town for a chili cheeseburger, Cowgirl Santa Fe. While this one was more a traditional cheeseburger compared to that Deli Factory tortilla one it was fantastic. It is served with a side of fries that were also fantastic2 and not totally outshined by the burger. The chili cheeseburger is listed on their menu as The Mother of all Green Chile Cheeseburgers.

At the bottom of the list of ingredients, 3 on its own line is, Just ask for “Mother!”

I was going to try and be cute when I ordered one by telling the waitress, “I want my Mommy”, but Sally ordered first and asked for a Mother, so I ended up just saying ditto. Afterwards I realized that Sally probably saved me from kinda annoying the waitress who has probably heard that one from thousands of tourist wiseasses.

Big Leagues

A month ago, I stumbled on a couple travel poster jigsaw puzzles in the spot that community center sets aside for a puzzle exchange. I chose this one of the two because Sally of Santa Fe fame once served there on an overseas assignment with the State Department.

The note on the can didn’t scare me a bit. How hard can it be? I of course proceeded to try to do the outside first, didn’t take too long to abandon that plan. The pieces of the puzzle are all the same shape and the differences in the shapes are miniscule, so they seem like they fit together, but later you realize that the next piece will not fit in the spot you think it will go. I went back to the basics, words first, then giraffe, & then the mountains. The dark brown has a faint pattern making it doable.

When it came to the sky, really hard was an understatement. All those 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles I thought were hard were in the minor leagues, this one is in the show. After 6 unsuccessful attempts at the solid blue colored sky, I took the puzzle apart and put it back in the can.