November 20, 2020 1 of 8
I only have ten days left in the month. I’ve beaten my previous record of, like, 15,000 words. Will I make it to 50,000, though? I doubt it, but let’s try.
There’s a dish in the United States called “Cininnati Chili.” It’s not really chili, per se, as it has its root in the Mediterranean and not in South Texas. I wish I’d known that earlier. Oh, well, that’s all in the past.
Cincinnati Chili can be served several ways. And they are called just that — ways. Basically, you put the chili on top of spaghetti and then you can add cheese. Then you can add beans and/or onions on top.
Just before I moved down here (Thomas had been here for a month — Alex wasn’t born yet), I went out with a friend and some of her friends. One of her friends said that we had to try Wolf Chili when I got here. So we did, and boy was he right. It was excellent. It’s got a spicy, peppery flavor, but also has a very strong flavor of cumin. Yum!
Inspired kinda by Cincinnati Chili and kinda by using up leftover chili in “chili mac,” we used to use the Wolf chili almost as a kind of pasta sauce. We then decided to add cheese, and I ended up adding dark red kidney beans, too. So now we have what is more or less “four way” Cincinnati Chili with elbow macaroni instead of spaghetti and, of course, Wolf Chili.
Alex turned out to be either a regular taster who has a low tolerance for spice or a supertaster (which is odd, since I’m a nontaster), so he ended up having this dinner (which we just called “chili mac”) without the chili — just the pasta, beans, and cheese.
When Thomas left, I knew that half of the can of chili would’ve gone to waste if I kept up that recipe, so I just dropped it out and we made chili mac Alex-style into one of our dinners. We sat down and decided to dub it “macaroni, beans, and cheese.” We thought that putting “macaroni” and “cheese” next to each other would be confusing.
Macaroni, beans, and cheese has long been one of Alex’s favorite dinners and a staple in our diet.
And that’s what we had for dinner tonight.
For our Gratuitous Amazon Link, we’re beginning a Discworld run. I sat down and read, like, the first 22 Discworld books pretty much right in a row. Then I burned out and haven’t been back since. I’ll tackle the rest someday. For now, though, we have the epic fantasy parody novel that started it all, The Color of Magic, by Terry Pratchett.