It’s December 1, 2024 and it’s cold in the City on the Bayou, relatively speaking. It’s currently 55° F, which is cold for us. We’re all really butch about the oppressive heat down here, but you let it get below 70° for more than a day or so and we’re breaking out the sweats and blankets and enduring the smell of the heaters being fired up for the first time since February.

My butt puckers every time it comes on. Will this be the year the live flame in the attic moves outside of its containment? Are the batteries in the carbon monoxide detector still working? Come to think of it, where the hell is the carbon monoxide detector? What about the smoke alarms? Standard middle aged dad shit.

I’m not actually a fan of cold weather. I like the heat. I think it’s because I’m a nudist (non-practicing). I just don’t like wearing clothes – too restrictive. When it’s hot, I can strip down. I can take a cool bath, splay out naked on the tile floor like the dog taught me. I have options. When it’s cold, I have to wear all these clothes just to sit around in my house. Worse still, the stinky heater, previously mentioned, is only effective in two rooms and I’m seldom in those. So blankets are in order.

Now, I get up and move around to do whatever the hell it is I do in the evenings about every 15 to 30 minutes and I have to remove the blankets try to navigate around the pile, blah blah blah and I just don’t dig the restriction in my movement. I was a man of action once and some habits are hard to break. What I do dig about the cold weather is the menu change.

I can fire up both ovens, all five burners, those two induction burners my son got me and slow cook the hell out of anything. Without heating up the downstairs. It’s wonderful. Stews are the order of the day.

I’ve already done beef and barley stew this year, I’ll do it again, and were I not the worst food blogger ever, I’d have posted something about that. Now I’m wondering why I didn’t.

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I’m extremely forgetful, even in my sober periods, so a lot of what I do makes it to the socials and I completely forget about them. I’m genuinely trying to poop out as much content as I can over there, and it all kind of blurs together after a while. I did actually do a beef and barley stew post on Facetagram.

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Today I’m thinking about chili. I don’t have a chili recipe. I barely have a method, because it’s just not something we eat a lot of. Wife likes Wolf Brand for hot dogs and I’m OK with that. My method, is basically a Texas style chili (no beans) with a molé vibe, based on what I can find at the store. I don’t use ground beef, typically. I like chunks of chuck that fall apart if you look at them the wrong way. It’s beefy. It’s rich. It’s mysterious.

It’s also undocumented so I need to fix that before it gets deported.

Have you ever tried to do chili research on the internet? Or really, any kind of research on anything these days. It’s damned near a useless medium. There is a ton of info out there, most of it bad. So I think what I’m going to do is cherry pick what I know works and head to the store, which means it’s inventory time.

The thing is, when you are largely only coking for two people, sometimes one if the wife isn’t feeling overly adventurous, and most of the time you fluctuate between low cal/low cholesterol cooking and full-on French/Cajun/Creole, it’s hard to keep any fresh ingredients on hand. For example. I need cocoa powder for my chili. We had two cans on hand, only one of which was open. The open one expired in 2012. The unopened in 2022. I also noticed while trying to convert that spaghetti sauce into chili for picadillo a while back, that my chili powder seemed to have lost its soul. It’s OK. It happens to the best of us.

Upon examination, it is also way beyond its “Best By” date. Cumin is not a problem. I use the shit out of cumin, so it’s always fresh. Same thing with cinnamon, garlic and oregano. We have so much stuff in the house that is “past its prime” and I am largely the culprit. So when I shop today for the chili, I have to think small for the things I don’t normally use.

You ever try to buy a just a couple ounces of masa? The smallest size I can find is two pounds. That’s 30 ounces more than I’ll need. I’ll use cornmeal instead, assuming I need to thicken. Likewise, one bottle of Shiner Bock. They come in six packs, though maybe I’ll swing by a convenience store and look for a tallboy. (I’m trying to cut back on my alcohol consumption. Shock, I know.) You can also get single bananas from the convenience store. I told you my chili is mysterious…

I can’t actually go grocery shopping yet on account of the beer. This is Texas and we are not permitted to buy beer on a Sunday before 10 AM and I’m not making two trips. Prior to Covid, we couldn’t buy it before noon on a Sunday, so there’s that at least. There are all manner of things we aren’t allowed to do in Texas. It’s not that the government wants to prevent us from sinning, it just wants us to do it on its terms. Ya’ll should really think about that before moving here. Oh, and the property taxes. Those are fun.

Chili! Sorry. Right.

Chili recipes are like assholes. Everyone has one and what’s inside varies. I am a Texan. Down here, when we talk about chili, we are talking about Texas Red. No beans, no tomatoes, no two recipes alike. The only common ingredients are beef, some kind of chilé preparation, and moisture. Seriously. To make it worse, some people like ground beef (hamburger meat), chili meat (coarse ground beef), chunks of chuck, beef heart, brisket trimmings, or some other cut. Don’t get me started on the Wagyu douchebags.

Texas chili isn’t art. It’s a utility product. Like slow smoked brisket or chicken fried steak, chili’s purpose was to make tough, unpleasant meat edible. So many people want to make a big thing out of it, and that’s their business, but in my world, chili is a purpose driven product.

Shit! That’s a great idea! Someone get me Rick Warren on the phone. I want to pitch the “Purpose Driven Cookbook: 100 Sinful Recipes to Make You Beg for Forgiveness.”

At its heart, Texas Red is a slow cooked beef dish based on the 8,000 or so Mexican versions of Chile con Carné, plain and simple. It’s a main dish, it’s a condiment, it’s a side. It’s a car wax! OK, maybe not.

Chili can have beans (I embrace the blasphemy.). It can be served with beans and rice on the side. It can be garnished with cilantro or onions or cheddar cheese or sour cream or Oaxaca cheese (lovely, by the way). It can be served on rice, mixed with macaroni, served on top of Spaghetti (Cincinnati Skyline). Like anything, it’s really up to the cook and their preferences.

I’m the cook in question and I really don’t dig someone else’s rules about what I can and can’t do in my kitchen. My preferences are minced chuck roast (though with the price of beef these days, hearts are looking pretty good), garlic, crushed tomatoes, beef stock, chili powder, cinnamon, onion powder or real onions, Mexican oregano, cumin, smoked paprika, Shiner bock, 72% cacao dark chocolate, Lea & Perrins, Salt, Black Pepper, and a nasty-ass banana. I like it on top of rice or cornbread, garnished with finely chopped, fresh onion. Honestly, that’s much more complicated than I normally like my recipes, but it totally works. Properly executed, it’s like freakishly tender beef bits in a rich molé and that’s what I want.

I’ll post the recipe when I’ve figured how I want to handle those. Until then, here’s what’s in it.

Now go cook something.