Chili recipe (finally)

The leaves are starting to fall, and soon they will start changing colors. The air is starting to have that really nice chill, and the hint of woodsmoke is in the air. Saturdays are spent drinking copious amounts of beer and watching college football, wondering if being an LSU fan is really worth the ulcer it's giving me. It's fall; it's time for chili.

I've had a few requests to put my recipe for chili up here. I also need to make an entry since apparently I am the only author for what is already a half assed blog. [/passive aggressive jab at the other authors] I should really put more recipes here anyway, as cooking is something I love. The problem with me giving recipes though, as I have expressed before, is that it's hard to convey exactly what I do! I usually just make stuff, and I've been making this chili for a long time (12 years at least), and in that time I have tweaked and altered things, and what you read here is the product of over a decade of tweaking, altering, experimenting and learning. While making chili the past couple of times I have measured stuff out, and made a point to remember how much of everything I use. As far as I know this is the first time that I have actually written this down.

What you need:

• Two medium onions, diced
• One large green bell pepper, diced
• One head (that's right, a whole head) of garlic, minced
• 12 oz of mushrooms, diced
• Several tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
• Red pepper flakes, however much you think you can handle
• Chili powder, 5-6 tablespoons
• Brown sugar, 4 tablespoons
• Salt, not too much (you can always add salt; you can't take it out)
• Large can of crushed tomatoes
• Large can of diced tomatoes
• Three cans of beans (I used one each of black, red and navy)
• A beer

Get a nice sturdy pot and heat up enough olive oil to cover the bottom. Use a medium-high heat. Saute the onions and bell pepper together with the red pepper flakes (yes, right at the beginning) for a few minutes until the onion starts to get a little translucent. Then add the garlic; you don't add it at the start because you don't want it to burn. After another couple of minutes throw in your mushrooms.

When the mushrooms are completely moist deglaze with the beer. Just pour it all in there. Add the dry ingredients, stir well, and bring the whole thing to a boil. Let it boil for a minute or two. Stir to make sure nothing sticks.

Add tomatoes and beans. If you prefer you can cook your own beans beforehand and use them instead. If you do I will need to add a couple of cups of water too though. Bring it up to a boil and then put the heat on medium low, or whatever setting you need to use to make it simmer. (Different stoves behave differently.)

Now this is going to take a while. I mean like three hours or so, enough time to let the chemical composition of the tomatoes change. If you have tasted the chili before that point, it won't be that good. It won't taste bad, but it won't taste anything like it will after it's cooked for a few hours. While it simmers you are going to need to give this a stir every 15 minutes or so, or stuff will stick to the bottom and burn. If you feel a little sticking to the bottom of the pan, no big deal. Just do your best to use your stirring utensil of choice to scrape the bottom.

You probably won't need to, but if you think it's getting too thick you can add some water. Don't add any more than a cup at a time, as you don't want to cool it down too much, and also don't want it to get too watery.

When it's cooked a while you can taste it and see if it needs anything. (All chili powders are not created equal; sometimes I need to add a little more.)

Okay, this is my chili. It's good. You should make it.

Drunken ramblings

Drinking alone, it's almost 1:30 in the morning, and I'm a little drunk. Only a little. It's okay that I'm drinking alone since a) I have been diagnosed with depression and 2) I have a family history of alcoholism. Self medication eff tee double-you bitches! Seriously it's fine though; I'm a fucking LSU graduate, so my liver can take it. They give you extra credit for getting drunk. Hell, I think the first time I puked outside a bar they gave me two credit hours -- and that's graduate hours*!

I came in having no flippin clue what I was gonna write about. I just need to do something since 1) there are a few people that actually follow this blog for some God-forsaken reason and b) I post regularly on SB Nation where I link this blog, which is a network of thinking-man's blogs dedicated to... yeah sports. (And I like to have a fairly recent post on there.)

Sports? But you're vegan. Yes I am. I'm not a stereotypical vegan. I am sort of a guy's guy. I like the three Bs: Beer, boobs and baseball. Some people have this conceptualization of vegans as a bunch of tree hugging hippies. That's not really me. I guess I'm a bundle of contradictions. But this isn't about me -- it's about veganism going mainstream. Though I am an overeducated nerd, I'm also a "normal guy" in many respects. For some reason that seems to go against the typical conceptualization of the vegan -- the peace sign giving, yoga doing, kumbaya singing, tree hugging, slightly effeminate guy that's "in touch with his feelings." Sorry, but that's not me. Hell, to be honest, I'm not even a typical vegan animal lover! My knees don't go weak when I see that rescued baby goat at the communal farm, or your sister's ferret, or whatever.

Veganism to me seems like the most natural ethical position one can take. Animals are sentient beings -- capable of subjective perception. Let's be honest; cows and bulls are pretty fucking stupid. But that doesn't mean we should consume them and treat them as biological machines.

Going off on some animal rights rant is not my style, but at the same time I won't apologize for being a supporter of animals rights. And that's kind of my drunken, rambling, and very likely hard-to-follow point. I am a (sort of) "normal" guy, and I'm an unapologetic vegan. Honestly, I am the future hope of veganism and animal rights. No, I don't mean me specifically; I'm not a narcissist. What I mean is the mainstreaming of the vegan lifestyle and being a reasonable advocate of animal rights.

We need more normal vegans. If a more animal friendly perspective is to be ever be truly mainstream, then people that have mainstream tendencies will need to vegan. Moreover, this needs to become more and more normalized. It needs to be regular. I want to live in a world where being vegan doesn't mean that I am a weirdo, but rather a world where veganism is widely diffused among people that love boobs, beer and baseball, or that love NASCAR, hip hop, heavy metal, comic books, strip clubs, science fiction, model airplanes, S&M, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, motorcycles, classic cars... you get the point.

I don't know if any of this makes any sense or not. If it doesn't I plead drunkenness.

I wrote this listening to Murs. Murs is vegan, and he is an incredibly talented hip hop artist. This is what I am talking about. Veganism is becoming more and more mainstream and normal.

Some of my fellow vegans on the granola-crunching persuasion might find the idea of veganism becoming more mainstream as being somewhat strange, and on an intuitive level they might find it undesirable. Sorry, but you are just gonna have to put up with my beer drinking, boob loving, sports watching ass. No offense, but I have just as much of a right to be vegan as you do.

This post probably have a zillion typos. It's okay -- again: I'm drunk.

*Gregatron is a proud product of the Huey P. Long School of Government. (No, LSU's political science department is not actually called that, though I think we can agree that it should be.)