I decided forthwith at once immediately that this needed to be a spicy (spy-see) type of chili. ‘WHAT DOES A BODY NEED in order to produce such an exquisite dish as that?” I asked myself, loudly and with purpose. I will need peppers and meat and I imagine onions. Not knowing where to go beyond the imaginary onions, I opted to conslut an online interweb recipe. spicy + chili + recipe, these are search terms one might use. I wouldn’t. I never include plus signs whilst using the googs, but fortunately you get the same results. That’s right, Frank’s Spicy Alabama Onion Beer Chili is what’s on ze menu.
Let’s break it down. Reverse reverse (reverse).
Chili. This part of the dish is usually accomplished by the combination of meat with the other parts of the name. Minus “Frank.” We’ll get to that later. We (I) couldn’t decide kind of meat to use. There was beef and turkey. Turkey is healthier, but beef is beefier. The recipe called for 2 poundies of meat and only the beef came in even 1 pound packages. The turkey came only in 1 1/4 pound amounts and that was simply not acceptable, for either straight turkey or a beef/turkey cocktail.
Here is a picture of the cart - full of ingredients. This will hopefully make the next several paragraphs unnecessary.
Not all of the items were used for the chili. Several were. You would know this already if you had followed my helpful Google search directions to identify ze recipe. I also had to resize the picture because it was obscenely large. Like a pornographic penis. We ended up going with 2 pounds of regular unleaned beef.
Beer. That’s the Stella talking. The Bud Light was for drankin’. To be fair, so was the Stella. I like the Stella Artois because Wee Hughie drinks it in issues of THE BOYS by Garth Ennis. It’s a comic about a team funded by the CIA with little or no oversight that keeps tabs on a group of superheroes constructed by a member of the military industrial complex. Hughie was modeled after Simon Pegg before Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz came out, so Garth didn’t think anyone would recognize him. And that’s why I like to drink Stella Artois. The end.
It’s not the end.
Onion. The recipe called for two white onions. I bought two, but only used one, because the pot was really full. We actually had to pour part of the pot into a frying pan so that it would all fit. It’s a good thing that we didn’t include the 15 ounces of what were identified as “chili beans.” To my knowledge, this is not a type of bean. Chili isn’t supposed to have beans anyway. The onion was chopped.
Alabama. This must be the diced tomatoes and the tomato pure, eh. And nothing says Alabama like Worcestershire sauce. And Reeseys peanut butter bars.
Spicy. The recipe axed for four jalapenos. I tried to put the tilde on the “n” in jalapeno just now but apparently the Macs are not equipped to insert such a character. I only put three of them in because we were already running out of room in the pot at this point and they were a bitch to get the seeds out of. Although, by pepper number three I had the correct technique figured out. I suppose I could have gone ahead and used it. It needed it, after all. There weren’t enough jalapenos in this chili. We had briefly considered using habaneros in addition to jalapenos, but then Ryan remembered that he’s a huge pussy and we decided to stick with the original recipe. Except for the beans. No beans, please. This is chili, fuckface. We also used chili powder, pepper flakes, and Frank’s Red Hot. I do not like to shop at WalMart because they don’t sell Sriracha. I would have rather used Sriracha in this chili, but I couldn’t because they don’t have it. I meant to pick some up today when I was in Flagstaff. I even went to the grocery store and didn’t think about it. This is unfortunate, and I am only just now realizing my error. This is live.
Frank’s. When I originally decided to write out this description in reverse order (the reverse reverse (reverse) earlier was meant to reference the Cha-cha Slide. Plus an extra reversal so that it would be in the right order, only reversed) I didn’t think that there was going to be anything to include for “Frank’s.” I suppose that the guy who wrote the recipe could be named Frank, because there were no hot dogs in this recipe. But this isn’t interesting. I can only say so much about “Frank’s.” I realized at the end of the last paragraph that I could have mentioned the Red Hot at this point, but that it would be redundant.
We got the box of peanut butter bar mix because we had stopped and talking about peanut butter bars the last time we were at the store. The executive decision was made that we should go ahead and make them. They were obviously significant. We got back to the apartment, all excited to make shit, when we realized that we didn’t have a can opener to get into the tomatoes. Fuck damn, said we, this is a tragic turn of events. At least we can still make the peanu- fuck we don’t have any butter. So we played video games all night and went back to the store the next day. We did, however, get extra check-ins on Foursquare for the second trip.
Here I am preparing the beefs. Look how enthusiastic I am! It’s fun to prepare chili! Hahaha! We’re listening to Morris Day and the Time. This is funky chili. This picture, however, is posed for. Later, the entire stovetop surface would be covered with chili splatter because we kept knocking beeflets out of the pan while stirring, but mostly when we had to transfer the contents of the pot to the medium frying pan. It was pretty shallow so when the chili bubbled, there was a lot of spray. We cleaned it up as best as we could, but there’s some of it left. IT CAN BE DEALT WITH. This apartment sucks asses anyway, who cares about a chili mess.
Look how full this pot it. That’s why I had to leave out one of the onions. We also had too many tomatoes because we didn’t adjust the recipe portioning after eliminating the beans. I used the internet to look up “how to reduce chili” to make sure that turning the heat up and leaving the pot uncovered would actually do that. Instead, I got a bunch of results for how to reduce the chili’s spiciness. This is not what I wanted to have happen. So I switched my search to look for reducing soup instead. I was correct. This is a picture of me wasting a delicious comic book-inspired beer. The sole reason for taking this was so that I could have a follow-up picture of me drinking one with the caption “…and one for the doctor.” Ryan took a few, but they made me look fat. That’s not the impression I wanted to make in my picture of drinking beer and making chili.
HOLY FUCK THAT’S RIGHT. There are mufuckin Funyuns on top of that shit. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Whoa. That wasn’t in the recipe. I know, because I did spicy plus chili + recipe. Frank’s Alabama. A bit of culinary genius, yes. Also there’s cheese. I asked Marc if he wanted any cheese, and he said sure. Everyone else went along with it, too. The cheese is a four-cheese Eye-talian blend. These were a bitch to heat up.
Love,
Charles
