Visiting Tesuque, New Mexico

Tesuque was kind of a bust. It's a little village outside of Santa Fe that the guidebooks described a picturesque and green. Turned out to be a lot of winding desert roads through mostly residential neighborhoods. Nearly all the he houses were adobe, or looked like adobe, same as everywhere else we've been here. I like it, but I imagine the lack of architectural diversity could get monotonous after a while.

We had lunch at a place called the Tesuque Village Market. The guidebooks led us to believe it would be a big farmer's market with a lot of exotic food stalls, like we've enjoyed in Boston and Columbus, Ohio, and Portland, Oregon. Instead, it was a grocery store with the shelves and refrigerator and freezer cases lining the walls and tables for diners in between. I found it charming. Julie didn't seem to care for it, but she was still recovering from altitude sickness so it's hard to say. She had a chicken enchilada, which she pronounced as "all right." I had something called a Frito pie, which is apparently a signature blue-collar dish of the region: Marinated chicken, crisp cool lettuce, and shredded cheese on a bed of corn chips (I don't think they were actually Fritos, although they tasted the same).

The waitress asked me, "Red or green," which are the two kinds of sauces they serve on the New Mexican foods here. I believe they are both salsas, the red tomato-based and the green based on tomatillos. I need to ask someone about that though. Every place you go to eat New Mexican food, the server asks you "red or green."

The Frito pie was not bad. It had three primary flavors and textures: The room-temperature, crunchy corm chips, warm marinated chicken, and cool, crisp lettuce. Nice.

Some months ago, our friend Ken (not to be confused with my brother Ken, or our brother-in-law Ken) told us about a childhood delicacy: They'd go to a neighborhood grocery store and buy a bag of Fritos, then rip it open, add a ladleful of chili and eat it directly from the bag, after adding onions and shredded cheese and stuff. Turns out that's pretty standard here. Although my Frito pie was served in a bowl.

Later, we went to the Tesuque Glassworks, where they blow glass. There was a shop, of course, and a room where you could watch a glassblower at work. But Julie didn't care for any of the work on display there, and you couldn't really see what the glassblower was doing, so we only stayed a few minutes and left, after paying our respects to the shop cat, who was as fat and lazy and entitled as an oil company lobbyist.

Also, I forgot the battery from my camera. No photos.

Too bad the glassworks didn't work out. I was hoping to see a glassblower hiccup and get a pane in his stomach.

That was about 3 and we didn't have any great ideas for the afternoon, so we decided to go back to the casita and regroup. A short time later, I found myself spread out on the bed, surrounded and covered by guidebooks and the GPS and iPhone switched to Google Maps and scraps of paper. That's what "information overload" looks like.

Comments

[Ken]

Hard Times Cafe, a DC-area mini-chain of chili parlors, has Frito pie on its menu. I've never ordered it, though your ability to blog after eating it has eased my fear of it :)

[Curtis Beaird]

Cormac McCarty of " The Road" fame lives in
Tesuque, New Mexico. Is this a high dollar area?

[Mitch Wagner]

Don't know, actually.

[JulieBrown]

Looked like it could be, if you wanted lots of land surrounding whatever property you built. Or livestock space. "Sparsely populated" is how they describe it in New England.