Journal 36

My favorite meal would probably be my dad's chili and cornbread on a cold winter day. The following will be a description of how he makes it.

First he takes a giant silver pot out of the cupboard and places it on the stove. Next he takes two giant cans of foul-smelling, (in my opinion), Campbell's tomato juice and he pours them into the pot. He then takes a cutting board and chops up a white onion into tiny little pieces and puts them into the pot as well. He does not cry when peeling the onions, which I find incredibly strange. Anyway, the smell of the onions is sharp and I love being in the kitchen when he's cutting them. There is a sort of crisp smell to them.

Next he gets out five or six orange cans of Ray's chili. This is an incredibly unhealthy mixture of beans, meat, and a heck of a lot of grease. You can look at the surface of it and see the orange dots of grease and nastiness, but it tastes wonderful. Anyway, he scrapes all of that out into the giant pot as well and sets it on simmer. Slowly you can start to smell the chili smell.

Next he takes out a pan and a large chunk of defrosted ground chuck meat and puts it in the pan. He then cooks it until it is browned all the way through. The smell of the meat as the smoke wafts up from the pan is wonderful. You can smell the meat all throughout the house and pretty soon my brothers and sisters come to investigate where the wonderful smell is coming from. My dad makes sure that all of the meat is perfectly brown and not a single ounce of it is pink in any way, and then he sweeps all of that with a spatula into the giant pot as well.

Lastly he puts in all sorts of spices. I do not have those memorized because most of the time he is just messing around with them anyway, there is no specific plan for how he puts them in. Still, he must do something right because they make the chili perfect.