Stocking the pantry this weekend [View all]

I made chile paste last night with equal parts ancho, mulato and pasilla; 1.5 pounds total. Standard technique; stemming and seeding, toasting, soaking and blending. I also food mill to get out the skins and stray seeds, but that's just me. I got 8 cups of paste.

7 are in half-pint canning jars, just about to come out of the pressure canner. (I'll fry the paste just before I use it in a recipe.) Each jar can be assumed to contain roughly 6 chiles.

The 8th cup has been seasoned and augmented and is now combined with ground pork to make six 8-ounce portions of primo chorizo. Five are in the freezer, one in the fridge for tacos this week.

My hands are stained terra cotta and there's a blister where I touched the hot toasting pan. Heating up the paste for the canning jars, a lava bubble exploded all over the wall. The house smells...interesting. I'm pretty sure it's still unsafe to touch my eyes. This is a real pain in the ass, but I sure am feeling good about getting it done.