Old New Mexico

There's a restaurant-- Adobe Rose Cafe-- near our house that serves New Mexican food, and unpretentiously at that.  Once I found out about the purveyors of green chile and sopaipillas, I knew we had to go at once.  Some of you may not know that Adam and I met while living in Santa Fe, the enchanting and strange southwestern town at 1700 feet above sea level, and many miles from anywhere resembling anything metropolitan.  Such isolated places inevitably cultivate unique cuisines, and I have been missing terribly the exotic, spicy offerings which, over several hundred years, have been informed by Native American, Mexican, and American cultures.

The interior of Adobe Rose is unprepossessing-- linoleum floors, basic wooden chairs composed the basic skeleton of its decoration, though a couple flowers sat in a vase at each table, and lovely photos of the Land of Enchantment hung on the walls.  We looked at our laminated menus, and decided to go pure-- Huevos Rancheros for Adam, and cheese enchiladas for me.  That way we could appreciate New Mexico's most valuable invention-- chile-- in an unadulterated fashion.

While we waited chips and salsa (free) flowed generously forth, and so did some decent margaritas (not free).  We admired the photos on the walls and tried to guess where they were taken.  One gorgeous church, where Adam and I actually contemplated looking into as a wedding location, turned out to be near Adam's old house in Espanola.  We missed the rolling red deserts with aching hearts, and discussed the prospect of returning to live in a few years.  (On that note, Adam got a job today!  He'll be working for PGE here in Oregon as a wind technician, which means he'll be climbing windmills many hundreds of feet tall every day so that we may have appliances running on clean, sustainable energy.  Needless to say I'm proud of my boy.  Anyway, Adam said that there are a few windfarms under construction in New Mexico, and we just might look into one of them as sources of income when they come to completion.)

So our food was out by now-- plain white dishes with vast plains of melted cheddar lying on top of our enchiladas (only difference was that Adam had a few fried egg mountains on top of his cheese desert).  And oh, delicious memories of sitting, on a balmy evening on the patio of The Shed in Santa Fe, or remembered nights of setting many such chile-and-cheese baked plates in front of tourists and locals alike at Maria's New Mexican Kitchen (where I waited tables for a year).  The chile was good-- very good.  Very spicy, which is good.  I ordered mine "Christmas," (red and green chile) and both colors were fabulous.

I struck up a conversation with our waiter, who turned out the be the owner.  Larry and his partner Terry ("Just remember, Larry and Terry") met while living in Albuquerque and came to Portland almost twenty years ago to start Adobe Rose.  Apparently there are either enough New Mexican natives making their way through town craving "sopas" (sopaipillas are big, deep-fried dough pillows that you can use to sop up your chile or douse in honey for dessert), in order to support such an establishment, or there are sufficient local Portlanders who consider the spicy unique flavors worth returning to, again and again.

Lord knows we will be returning.  Prices are modest and most importantly, the food set us into a sweaty reverie of the arid, sage-smelling place we knew and loved as Santa Fe.