Pink Chili

Looking for a car this past weekend, I stumbled into a Halloween Monster truck Rally. Cars. When you’re looking for a car, suddenly they all become so interesting. The more I read this, the more what you drive seemingly becomes a moral decision. Driving used to seem so freeing. Did you remember that mind whammy accompaning your first solo drive… leaven the confinement of parent dictated travel. Driven then was celebration. If my next car could just catch a glimpse of that, not quite in this way but maybe soma that --- just enough of that former road glory could be regained to make the gas sucking schlep tolerable.

Our lives’ barometers. They crop up in the most unexpected places. T’other night I had some harmonious moments strung together in the kitchen: measured in minutes, 120 of them. Inspired by my favorite freshly barred barrister, or maybe she’s a solicitor, (either way she reads briefs and regardless she’s an attorney). Now that we’re confused the meal was chili to be sure. Chili that looked and tasted so good it seared into my mind, a formerly chililess mind.

Now this dish, this pink chili, (the photograph above doesn’t nearly translate the flavor bud popping goodness), is an exceptional specimen; exceptional being meant not only as exemplary but rare. To be honest though, the whole meal was actually a glorious debacle. I was trying to make the barrister’s chili and combine it with a side of my roommate’s sweet potato sliced carrot mash-up but non-selective selective memory made for a wonky imitation.

So initially following a recipe, I spiced it like chili (coriander, cumin, chili powder, pepper), but then somewhere in the turning to the rotating contents within the fridge and cutting vegetables, all sorts of ingredients such as the usual onions, garlic, tomatoes and yellow peppers went in , plus the expected, queso, beans (red and pink), but then the unusual, beats (source of pinkness), corrots, broccoli, turnips, brussel sprouts, spinach, potatoes, honey and dill. Now maybe those ingredients aren’t so unexpected, I don’t know, because like cars, chili is new to my radar. But on these rain swept cool weather autumn days, the soothing belly warmth of chili might just be labeled edifying.


Rumor also has it T-ra put on another year, Happy Birthday