Some food-related (mostly) things we enjoyed this week:

We’ve written about our love of the Hatch green chile before, but if you’ve never heard of them, they are green chiles grown in the Hatch Valley in New Mexico and only available for a few weeks out of the year. We’re not sure what makes them better than regular green chiles, but they are hands-down the best. Considering the distance between New Mexico and Illinois, as well as the lack of any respectable Tex-Mex dining options in Chicagoland, we didn’t think we’d be seeing any Hatch chiles around these parts. So we were beyond surprised and excited to see that an upscale grocery store a few towns over was having two glorious days celebrating (and selling) the Hatch green chile! We bought a bunch of the roasted chiles, portioned them out and stocked our freezer. We’re looking forward to many batches of green chile chowder this winter.

If you ever need to find us on a weekend during the summer, check any and all local art festivals. The Port Clinton Art Festival last weekend was a quick train ride north, and it was one of our favorite festivals this season. There were a ton of wonderful artists and an impressive variety of delicious food options.

 We couldn’t resist purchasing this glass bowl from the festival and had fun chatting with the artist to learn how he makes the bowls.

Anybody need some jalapenos? The plants in our little terrace garden have produced way more jalapenos than we can use before they spoil, so we harvested the ripe ones (and there are still a ton more on the plants!), filled up four quart-sized ziplock bags and stuck them in the freezer. As a Texas girl, it makes me happy to have an entire shelf of our freezer dedicated to green chiles and jalapenos.

While it’s not necessarily my favorite (*understatement alert*), football season is pretty much the best time of year according to Dan. He especially enjoys the fantasy football league that he has participated in with his brothers for more than a decade. They had their draft last night, and Dan tells me that he’s got a good line-up for his team formerly known as the Texas Trainwrecks. Now that we no longer live in Texas, he needs to come up with a new team name. The Illinois Windburn is the top contender currently, but he’s open to any and all suggestions.