Those of you who know me know I love tacos. So much so that when my Mom asks me what I’m having for dinner during our daily phone conversations, she’s started prefacing her question with, “Please don’t tell me you’re having tacos.” So, often, I have to come up with a creative way to describe my tacos that doesn’t include the word “taco”. Truth be told, my tacos are not traditional. They are about as Mexican as Chicago deep-dish pizza is Italian. My tacos basically include whatever I have around stuffed into an El Milagro corn tortilla, and usually include a lot of home-grown veggies. They can have bacon, steak, fish, or just pan-fried veggies and refried beans or lentils. In the summer they feature freshly made tomato or tomatillo salsa garnished with fresh cilantro. I recently got some stainless steel taco stands to bake my tortillas for hard shell tacos and I also am experimenting with a cast iron tortilla press and organic masa flour, but I have not mastered the art of tortillas yet.
But, one thing that is consistent in my tacos, and that I have mastered, is homemade hot sauce. One of my favorite homemade hot sauces is blueberry hot sauce. This should not surprise anyone, seeing as how I am a blueberry farmer. I also love growing hot peppers which are of course the foundation of any hot sauce. My current favorites are jalapenos, serranos, and buena mulata hot peppers, all of which I grow for sale here at Argento Acres. To make my blueberry hot sauce I include hot peppers, white vinegar, apple cider vinegar, salt, peppercorns, a bit of turmeric powder, cumin, and a handful of blueberries. There is a Vitamix involved, but I can’t tell you anymore or I’d be giving away trade secrets. Also, since I don’t have a set recipe yet I don’t really know what quantities to tell you. But, I can tell you the general principles of how to make it and I can set you up with the hot peppers, blueberries, and turmeric and you can experiment to your heart’s content. But I digress. The lovely thing about these ingredients is that I can freeze both blueberries and hot peppers and make a fresh batch of hot sauce year-round. It is April, and I still have enough of both in the freezer to keep me in hot sauce until July.
What you are looking at in the photo above are bottles of 2023 hot sauce. I know this to be true because I dreamed of tacos, which need hot sauce, which need peppers, which need to be grown from seed and tended with care. Because supply chain issues affect everything these days, I needed to plan ahead and make sure to buy my favorite seed varieties before they were out of stock. None of these steps looks anything like tacos or hot sauce, but the dreaming of them is necessary nonetheless in order to have hot sauce at the end of the process. The ability to envision the reward of next year is a skill all good farmers must have, whether they are conventional or organic. On my farm, dreaming of hot sauce also means envisioning the biology in the soil that best fosters the growth of the most flavorful hot pepper varieties, like my beloved buena mulatas. It means envisioning how my peppers fit into the ecology of the farm as a whole.
But I can see further into the future too. I see bottles of my blueberry hot sauce for sale at the farmers’ market. Probably not this year, because making processed foods requires learning another set of food safety laws, getting equipment that can make large enough batches, and making sure I have staff to take on the extra work. A lot of planning goes into a new enterprise to ensure it is successful and profitable. But, as you can see above, the seeds for that have already been planted.
So the point of this post and my random musings about non-traditional tacos and hot sauce, can, I supposed be summed up with cliches like, “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”, or “good things come to those who wait”. Or, as Henry David Thoreau said, “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. ”
But, those are not my words. In my world, I am busy planting the seeds of craveable tacos drizzled in spicy homemade blueberry hot sauce. What seeds (metaphorical or otherwise) do you need to plant this year to bring your visions to life?
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