The heat index outside is only 99 degrees so I don’t feel too stupid about what I am about to do. I am going to make chili. Yeah, you heard me, the state dish of Texas.
I don’t know what it is. I just had a busy day and had to buy something for dinner so I decided to buy the makings for a bowl of chili. Of course, it shall not cook for as long as I would like. No worry, I bet I still eat it.
Chili was the first food that I ever cooked that was better than my momma’s. It pains me to say that and I sure as hell never told my mother when she was alive that I made chili better than her. I made my first pot years ago when I worked as a firefighter. It was a freezing-ass January day, sleeting some as I recall. And we got called out on a house fire that afternoon just as I had begun cooking it. The house, a shotgun shack and thankfully not the one I was living in at the time, was a goner when we pulled up. When I got back to the station, I fired up the stove again and let the pot o’ chili cook some more. It was mighty fine.
I thought my chili was pretty good then and still do. My friends and I used to try to best each other on chili which led to an annual series of parties during my college years and just afterwards. These were weekend-long affairs with multiple kegs of beer. It was a wonder any chili was cooked at all and that we didn’t either set anything on fire or shoot someone. Let me just say a couch that I was getting rid of once and ended up on the bonfire one night of the chili cookoff proved not to be a very secure object to hide behind. That is because it was shot, really shot, to hell by all manner of gunfire. Drunk college kids with guns and chili. Nowhere but Texas.
This will be a more peaceful occasion making this bowl of red, or so I hope. Yeah, it’s crazy making it in this weather. But it will be most righteous, for sure.