Brick Street Chili Cook-Off 2006

Four-L* in the hiz-nouse, beeyotch! Daniel and I man the chili booth.
(*4L is the year designation for a law student who has atteneded the evening program their entire career of study - tradtional law school ends at 3L, but like the chili trophy says, I'm alternative.)

This is my 5th year attending this particular chili-cook off. I like this chili cook off because it is an independent, not affiliated or sanctioned by the larger chili cook-off bodies. (yes there are such things) This is good because I am a vegetarian, and vegetarian chilis are not allowed in sanctioned competition. This year, my good friend and fellow JD student (who has since passed the bar) Daniel agreed to come and help support the chili cause.

As ususal, I had done most of the prep work Friday night before. Thanks to the generally warm October, I had an abundence of fresh hot peppers and the bulk of the spice was 29 stemmed and seeded habaneros which were then hand-charred on the little gas burner in the left of the above photo.

Despite all the prep work, I got there right at the end of registration as always. When I got there the owner of the Friendly Tavern exclaimed "you're just now getting here!?!" and we ended up having to squeeze into the very end of the alley, right next to the traffic of 1st Ave. However, the owner was nice enough to dig up a second extension cord for us as the one I brought wasn't long enough to reach so far.

So we quickly set up the booth, grabbed a couple of huge bloody marys from the contestant's provisions booth and started cooking. It only took about 30 minutes before all the ingredients were boiling away in the roaster. Quickly a couple of chubby girls, who were also making a vegetarian chili, pop over to scope out the competition. Their chili was named "the laughing cow" in French, which I thought was Spanish. Eh, I recovered with some comment abount all the romance languages being the same anyway; then Daniel and I dodged off to grab a couple of huge screwdrivers and take a smoke break...

We decided this sign was "void for vagueness" and proceeded on our merry way

Zionsville is actually a pretty cute little town in places. It was a fantastic day for chili, temps in the 50's with a brisk wind, yet nice and sunny with a too-blue sky. Shortly after we returned to our booth, my wife Anika joined the party.

Anika was a total trooper, despite flying in from Washington DC just a few hours prior. Glad she came, she's the one with the camera!

About this point, I met my pal spidervillan for the first time in meatspace. Good man. Likes his chili hot, the way god intended. (Sorry, I can't recall his given name at the moment. After being a kid in the BBS scene, a teen in the goth scene, and now having most of my personal interaction on-line, birth names seem like a bit of an anachronism to me, I've replaced all handles with IRL names as much as I could from the original writing)

So yeah, the chili... Well, for starters, I use dried beans at this thing - they're both way more economical and way tastier when done proper. Usually I boil all my beans a day or so in advance to soften them to the correct point. This year I cooked them overnight on Thursday night, and tried them again Friday night and decided they were "done enough" to leave them off the heat. (I mean, the directions on the bin at Georgetown Market say "boil for 1 and 1/2 hours"... you'd end up with slightly chewy-skinned rocks if you only boiled these things that long! On Saturday, the beans ended up being a bit too firm. Not nearly as firm as in my Chili del Diablo, which were SUPER dry, but still won the 2002 alternative category. Still, I had more then one person tell me "your beans aren't done"... but I also had more than one person tell me they were glad someone hadn't just cooked their beans to mush, guess it's all subjective. - more on the subjective nature of chili later - but the overwhelming consensus was that our chili was hot. Damn hot.

Here I am, stirring molten chili death, apparently.

So like I said, our chili had 29 habenero peppers, about a cup or so of chopped chilis, and a few tablespoons of a mix of dried chili powder, cayenne pepper (5,000 scoville), chipolte powder, and some other secret spices for my 20 quart roaster full of chili. Usually I consider my chili moderate in heat, and it's never been the hottest chili of the day before, but this year it was universally regarded as the hottest chili of the competition by a wide margin. Just like everything else there were plenty of people who went "thank god there's a chili that taste's like chili", but there were also those who found my chili... unagreeable...

One middle aged lady took a bite and asked with an agahast-yet-concerned expression "have you actually tasted your chili?"... got a smile and a warm nod from me in return. One skeezy looking alternateen with a lip ring that was obviously beyond infected came up with some heavy attitude. "so this is 'alternative' huh?" she snorted with the sort of dismissive look that only a neoteen dismissing an almost-30something with more street cred in my broken little toe than her whole body can give. Oh she said some other stupid things, but I obviously give them heed neither then nor now, so I am unable to recall them all for you. I will tell you that she did a shooter of my chili and quickly and pathetically dribbled it out of the front of her mouth onto the street before me while giving a sort of hang-dog expression as if I had just washed her infected mouth out with betadyne or told her that avenged sevenfold was a bunch of tone-deaf, no talent, poseurs.

Naturally, I greeted this development with a series of hearty guffaws and a warm feeling of self-satisfaction.

Chili is really such a subjective thing, though. I usually try at least the broth and a few beans from most of the other chilis, and usually for at least half of them I want to spit their tepid shit right out and ask what the hell delusion thinks you should be in a chili cook-off. But then there are people who are convinced that a human being couldn't actually eat my chili, much less enjoy it and I must just be pulling a joke on them. I've seen people make a chili base out of ketchup, ferfuckssake. So then what really is "the best chili"? It would be like "the best art" which means if we're being democratic, the winning chili would be the equivalent of Thomas Kinkade: Painter of Light. Fuck that shit man, fuck that shit. I'm not Thomas Kinkdae... hell, I'm not even Andrew Wyeth.

But that's the beauty of a good chili cook-off, its diversity. The alternative to the hit-but-usually-miss nature of the Zionsville cook off is the stodgy elitest affairs of the regulated chili world, and that's a world with no place for me within.