Hot Hot Hot

In honor of the ACC Tournament beginning we had a chili cook-off at work and even broke out the TV for some game watching. Six people entered including me. Prior to Wednesday night I had never made chili before and never cooked in a crock pot. I found a recipe, Tyler Florence's recipe for Beef Chili with Red Beans and Chocolate on the trusty Food Network site and gave it a shot. The main issue I had with the recipe was that it said it should take about 3 hours but in reality using the crock pot I started around 7:30 pm and it cooked all night and I even had to put it in the oven for an hour before work to finish it off, all told about 11 hrs of cooking time. The recipe turned out pretty well and it caused reactions varying from yum to excitement over a burning mouth to people breaking out in sweats. I didn't really think it was that hot but that's just me. As you can see from the picture below Brian's Bodacious Bold Beef Chili Concoction won the hottest chili award which was a $20 Target gift card which almost pays for my crockpot purchased at Target on Tuesday.



In other news, I'm taking one of my three community service days (yes we get community service days!) to help my granddaddy sell Brunswick Stew for the Elon Exchange Club fundraiser. Last night we delivered some turkey to the guys cooking the stew and I saw the biggest pots I've ever seen. They have three 300 gallon cast iron pots bricked in over gas burners. You can see the oar-like paddles they use to stir the stew in the picture. Should be fun and good practice for some mental math when making change. Tomorrow I'm playing golf with Joel while Katie sits on the sideline on the 15 day DL (see her latest blog post).