When it comes to the war between men and women, I'm usually ready to do battle. And my most frequently-fought battle is against the cliches women toss around about men. You know, like the one that says we're all slobs. I'm actually rather fastidious, prefer monastic neatness to clutter. And my pal Doug in Reno, hoo boy. This guy makes Felix Unger look like a bear in a cave. When we were roommates years ago, we had the tidiest apartment in Vacaville, CA.
By contrast, my last girlfriend before I moved in with Doug was a slob's slob. Fruit bats keep the eaves of the buildings where they hang out cleaner than Jamie kept her half of our place.
But there's one cliche about men I will not argue with. Every guy in the world thinks he's the best chili-cook on the planet. I don't get it. Does it have something to do with the atavistic notion of the chuck wagon on the cattle drive? Beats me, but there are two things every guy thinks he makes better than every other guy: meatloaf and chili.
I once participated in a chili cook-off in Brazil. I lost. Yeah, well, this "cook-off" was fixed: the guy who won was passing out free shots of tequila. How sneaky is that? My chili was better than his. I was using real beef, for one thing. The guy who won was using hamburger. Puh-lease.
Chili purists do NOT put beans in their concoctions. That's for amatchoors. What I usually do, if I'm trying to impress a crowd, is cook up a pot of pintos and put it alongside the no-beans chili, and anyone who wants beans can add them.
Okay, now that I got all that off my chest, I made a huge pot of chili last Thursday for my wife Valerie's office Christmas party, which I am not going to call a "holiday party." The village atheist around the corner can kiss my big fat hairy French-Canadian ass if he doesn't like it.
Now, I was preparing this chili for a party, not a cook-off, which means two things: (1) I had to make a LOT of it, and (2) Of course I was going to cut corners. What does a roomful of Washington, D.C. real estate agents know about chili?
For one thing, I did throw in beans. When you're making chili for that many people, you need an extender, and anyway, knowing what I do about these east coast people, e.g. that most of them are "spice wimps," I wanted to add something that might take the "edge" off the crushed red pepper that I wasn't about to leave out completely, east coast spice-wimps be damned.
I didn't follow any recipe; I just threw this chili together. But it was one of those miraculous mornings when everything does indeed seem to "come together." When my neighbor Donald L. Williams came by around noon, as I was putting the finishing touches to this pot of chili, I asked him to step inside and taste it. "I'm afraid it might have just a touch too much 'heat' for this D.C. wimpy crowd," I told him. "Taste it and tell me what you think."
Donald took a bite. "You done GOOD, son," he said. "This is mother!@#$%n' good."
Donald's native eloquence, not to mention his honesty, warmed my heart, as I'm sure my chili warmed his.
"Great. I'll save some for you," I said.
The party crowd seemed to agree with Donald. I hauled more than a gallon of this stuff into the condo where the party was being held, and when the festivities broke up about three hours later (I was also tending bar), I think I had maybe a quart left to bring home. The revelers went through my chili like locusts. Even the wimpos who thought it was a tad spicy finished off their bowls of it nonetheless.
"Well," I said to myself, "You'd better get this concoction codified." And, by the way, when I was scraping the leftovers into Tupperware the following morning, I couldn't resist plunging my spoon in and tasting, tasting, tasting. Even COLD this stuff was good. Whatever I did, I did it right.
So, here, one mo' time, is one mo' guys' chili recipe. Trust me on this one. Just trust me (he said, taking off his Indiana Jones hat).....
KELLEY'S SURE-TO-KEEP 'EM COMING BACK CHILI
Ingredients
5 lbs. ground beef (you can cut back on these proportions of course. Remember I was cooking for 30.)
1 large onion
1 large green bell pepper
3 cans of Hunt's tomato sauce
1 large can of Hunt's tomato paste
3 cans of diced tomatoes with green chiles.
2 tablespoons salt
2 tablespoons pepper
2 tablespoons onion salt
3 tablespoons cumin
1 tablespoon crushed red pepper
3 packages pinto beans
2 cups water
Start parboiling the pintos before you do anything else. They need to simmer until they're almost mushy. Then start browning the ground beef, adding the seasonings as you go until all the meat is cooked and seasoned. (Be careful with the crushed red pepper. A tablespoon will be too much if you're only making this for four people.) Take the browned and seasoned ground beef and dump it into a pot. Dice and add the onion and green bell pepper, then throw in the tomato sauce, tomato paste and diced tomatoes with green chiles. Once the beans are reasonably soft, throw them in too, stir and let the whole mess simmer for about an hour. When it cools, it's going to get thicker. That's when you'll want to add water to achieve whatever degree of thickness you prefer. Re-heat, load in the car and head for the party. Make sure the lid is on tight in case you run into cross-town traffic.
Wine suggestion: a good cold Sam Adams lager.
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