A Bowl Of Red, And We're Chili-ing.

[title type="h4"]Monday, January 6, 2014.[/title] The blast of cold that we've been waiting for has arrived. The temp didn't rise into the forties today, and tonight my defenses were put to the test by a low of fifteen degrees at the Cool Water Ranch. Everything held. We have three more very cold days ahead, but now I can breathe easy. And be glad I we don't live in the Northeast and Midwest. A widely-circulated report had it that there were places in Antarctica warmer than Chicago would get from this freak arctic air. On Friday, when the first cold weather rolled into New Orleans, Mary Ann was talking about making a pot of chili. Chili con carne--as in the Texas and New Mexican stews--was once common on New Orleans menus, if mostly in the neighborhood places and poor boy shops. Chili has a rough-hewn reputation. When Texas writer Frank X. Tolbert organized the first world chili cookoff, he rightly had it in Terlingua--a ghost town in the Big Bend Country. I can only think of a few places that serve a bowl of chili now. Even those usually feature it as a soup of the day. I brought the search to my listeners today and they turned up one good one I hadn't heard about. Houston's offers chili every Friday, they said, and it's terrific. Since chili isn't a New Orleans dish, we'll overlook the chain aspect. [caption id="attachment_40725" align="alignnone" width="480"] Chili con carne, in a bowl made specifically for chili.[/caption] Mary Ann didn't make chili Friday. She talked about it again on Saturday and yet one more time on Sunday. But I know that when Mary Ann blurts out a plan, it's not a matter of whether but when it will be done. By God, there would be a pot of chili on the stove sooner or later. And here it was. She made it from ground round, hot chili peppers from a wreath of dried peppers I didn't even know we had, and all the usual spices. There were beans: MA likes beans in almost everything. She asked me for little advice other than the location of the chili powder. That's a switcheroo. I'm usually the one who can't find anything, until she grabs it from right in front of my face and shakes it at me. The finished product looked great, but was lacking (she said) in something. She had already rightly added cumin; I added turmeric. She had oregano in there, to which I added marjoram. And more peppers, and enough water to break out some of the fat that was hiding in the pot somewhere. From a chili cookoff I judged in Houston a long time ago, I learned that a layer of translucent, orange grease at least a half-inch thick is essential for that chili flavor. It was thicker than I would have done it, but by every other index we found the flavors we were dreaming of. I ate two large bowls. Appropriately, the bowls were wide, low Tabasco bowls given me as a Christmas gift by Richard Dominique, the producer of my radio show until Katrina. Almost everything in my kitchen tells a story, don't it? While the chili was simmering in its pot, Mary Ann made a batch of jalapeno and jack cheese cornbread to go with it. Perfect! What better supper could a man have on a cold day?