The marked-down box of Outdoor Fixings for Chili tempted me. Okay, so it’s summer, I still wanted a spot of chili. I bought it and brought it home to make a small pot of chili.
Opening the box I found a handful of dried beans and the usual chili seasonings. Good thing I bought this stuff on super clearance. Worse yet, the instructions said to soak the beans for five hours.
Good night! It would be forever before I could declare, “Soups on!”
I pulled out a can of cooked kidney beans with jalapenos and put the others in water in the refrigerator.
Beans, seasonings and … it called for a pound of hamburger. None of that in my freezer, but I did have the last package of ground deer meat that David Miller gave me. Good stuff, no gamey taste or smell. No one ever declared, “Venison, right?!” when I served it. It looked larger than a pound. Oh well, a meaty chili suits the palate.
The block of frozen meat would take a while to cook since it would also be thawing. While it steamed, I began cutting up celery and onions. Betwixt and between I cut off the exterior layers of now cooked ground meat.
Hmmm … the recipe on the box called for a 28-ounce can of tomatoes. Right. I had 14-ounce cans …. I guess two of those would do just fine and both came with chili flavoring.
My four-quart pan had hit the comfortably full mark – a bit more than my original plan for a small pot – time to let it cook. I popped on the lid and then I remembered that sometimes I put shredded carrots in chili.
No fresh carrots, but I did have a pound package of carrot coins in the freezer. Nuke-em, chop’em, dump’em and I had vegetarian venison chili.
Or something like that.
This chili did not look right – too many orange carrots. I opened the pantry door and found Hormel chili with no beans and Wolf chili – just what the medium-sized pot of chili needed to make it look and taste right. The can opener cut through the tops smoothly and the chili slid into my now more-than-nearly-full pot of soup.
This would take a while to cook. I may as well add the dried beans and let them stew in the big pot of chili. I would eat something else.
I dumped in the bean pellets and stirred. It needed more onions. I tossed in half of a small jar of dried onions and a few thumps of chili powder seasoning.
It was looking good, but now the chili reached the brim of the pan. Time to pull out the crock pot.
I put the crockery dish in the sink, carefully lifted the overflowing pan of chili and carried it gently across the room from stove to sink to tip the soup into the crock.
Still room at the top for the last two of those tomatoes which I knew, despite my best intentions, I would never eat. The chopped up, raw tomatoes and pellet beans needed to cook. I put on the lid and left the kitchen. I had to quit fussing with my now huge pot of soup … I could just barely put the lid on the crockery.
Except for stirring occasionally, the slow cooker received no further attention until the next day when I took a small spoon to test my monster pot of chili.
It still needed something. I dipped up a small bowlful of chili to eat.
It needed salt. My cupped hand measured what looked like the right amount of salt. My mind said, “Awww, why not finish up the dried onions?” I tossed in the rest of the jar of flakes.
A couple of hours later, a taste test said it would do. Great, but now I had a very large pot of chili and all our teenage boys have been middle-aged, married men living in other states for many years.
Well, there was that note for the evening gathering which read, “bring snacks.”
Soup can be a snack. Chili is soup. Just add cheese on the side for those who like to accessorize.
Some folks looked askance at chili in the summer. Others said, “I have been wanting some soup.”
I left with a small pot of chili. After two days of cooking and a sack of groceries, I had just what I had wanted in the first place – one small pot of chili that tasted just right.