Chili

We had our first frost of the season last night. The front yard was very white with frost this morning, and my normally teal vehicle was also a frosty white. I'm glad I brought my pepper plant inside last night – it has a beautiful pepper in the midst of turning red, and I wanted to give it a chance to finish turning so I can enjoy it.

It was the perfect day to fix that first pot of chili for this cold season. And that chili tasted very good, if I do say so myself. The ground beef, ground turkey, minced onion mixture cooked to a beautiful golden brown, with the onions just disappearing into the meat. The chili seasoning was added and stirred into the meat while the browning continued. The beans in chili sauce and the tomato juice were added in, and the porcelain-coated cast iron pot allowed the mixture to simmer nicely for about an hour. Yummy!

Before you feel like I'm patting myself on the back a little too much, let me share a secret with you. Chili is one of those things that for years I just couldn't make well. Probably a lot of people have that issue – some seemingly simple food that you simply can't master. For years, I tried. I really did.

I didn't have a specific recipe, so I checked magazines (this was before the digital age) for recipes and tried to find a recipe that tasted right. I experimented.......and some of those recipes weren't all that great. It wasn't until after I'd moved back home in 1993 that I finally found “my” chili recipe. And it truly isn't mine at all.

When I moved back, I was working at the local hospital. My kids were attending our local church youth group. Unbeknownst to me, the parents were taking turns feeding the youth group Sunday night supper each week. No one evidently stopped to think that I might not be able to afford doing that. I think I had two weeks' notice when my turn was coming up. My first reaction was to panic. There was another mom I was to work with on that meal, and doing chili and cinnamon rolls was her idea. She's a great baker, so she offered to do the cinnamon rolls.

One of the perks to my job was that I could eat lunch in the hospital cafeteria. And I enjoyed the chili they served there. So I asked the head cook for their recipe. It turned out so well that I've never made any alterations to it other than using a beef/turkey mixture instead of straight beef. The chili went over well at youth group, though the cinnamon rolls were a bigger hit!

For several years, our family has opted to have soups for our holiday meal instead of turkey – we leave that to the in-law families so no one has turkey overload. I've made a habit of making that chili every year, and it's always a hit. I felt like a rock star the year my younger son-in-law made a nearly fatal mistake – he told me that it was the best chili he'd ever had.......in front of the rest of the family, including my younger daughter.

I think anyone who knows me is aware that I love to cook......it's the springboard for the title of this blog, as well as for my other blog (Brenda's Recipe For the Week). But I'm not perfect. I've made some memorable missteps in tweaking recipes. And I have my mental blocks. As I said earlier, for years I couldn't make decent chili.

I choose to think it's normal to have something that turns into a stumbling block. I never felt that way about my chili. The thing that really truly makes me shake my head is something so simple a child can do it......but I can't. I never have been able to. And at this point in my life, it probably won't happen. What is this thing that I can't conquer in the kitchen? Jello. As much cooking as I've done in my life, I can't get jello to turn out like it's supposed to. But I'm okay with that – jello is probably highly overrated!