monkeymom's Diaryland Diary
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Chile isn't chilly in the winter, no it's not, It's chilly in the summertime when Chile should be hot.
I was showing my journal to a girl I work with, and realized that it's been a week since I wrote anything, so I'm going to force myself to write. Luckily, today was fun and interesting, which is a nice change from the the recent Days of Dullness.
A week ago when I was in church, I signed up to make chili for the chili dinner tonight, and when I told Rich about it, he asked why, because we don't usually go to any of the ward activities, but I thought it would be a welcome change from sitting at home watching HGTV!
So yesterday I shopped for ingredients, and also borrowed a big pan, because the recipe I was planning to use makes a trough full of chili!
The last time I made Cincinnatti chili was about 20 years ago. I cooked up the two pounds of beans and when they were overflowing my 5-quart dutch oven, I had to pull out a second pan for the overflow, which is why I borrowed a big pan to cook it in this time!
Also, the last time I made it, I was opening a spice jar of cayenne pepper, ready to shake some in, when one of my kids came up behind me to ask something, and I turned my head to answer, while reaching out to shake in the pepper, and felt it dump into the pan! I screamed and tried to scrape some of the pepper out, but it was sinking fast into the chili, and it made a really hot pan of chili!
So there I was, with a pair of our local missionary Elders coming over for dinner and some mighty hot chili to serve them. Fortunately, guess what young men like to eat? That's right, hot chili! So they enjoyed it muchly, and then next day, the other pair of Elders stopped by, because they heard from the previous night's dinner guests that we had some hot chili and they wondered if there were any leftovers! (And since the recipe made a lot of chili, we had plenty of leftovers!)
This afternoon I woke up and starting cooking beans right away - the beans had been soaking overnight - and while they were cooking, Rachel called to say they were on their way over to do their laundry.
About an hour and a half later, I was adding a long list of spices to the chili, when Rachel and Ash showed up, and they said they had stopped to look in the windows of a couple of houses, because they are thinking of moving to Freeport if she gets the job at the hospital.
They showed me a couple of listings for houses online, and Rachel called the realtor to ask about one of them, and the next thing we knew, we were all on the way out to take a tour of a house! Oh my goodness, it was the cutest little jewel of a house, and we were all in love with the kitchen! (The main floor bathroom was also swoon-inducing!) That house has already got an offer and is in negotiation, so the realtor took us to look at another place, too, but the second place looked like the inside of a cardboard box after we'd seen the first house, so it was hard to get excited about it.
The realtor had brought a bunch of listings in roughly their price range for Rachel and Ash to look at, so we took those back to the house with us for looking at later.
It was time to go over to the church with my giant vat of chili, so we loaded it into the car and then decided to drive by and look at one more house before we went to the dinner. We just looked at the outside, and then went to the church, but I had the time confused, so we were late, and everyone was eating other people's chili when I got there and put mine out on the table!
So we ate chili, and then Ash was dying to go and look at another house, so he and Rachel left and I stayed to see the skit that RA helped write and was also acting in, because that is the kind of friend I am. It was exactly as funny as I thought it would be, in other words, not so much, but then it was over, and Rachel and Ash were back to pick me up so I could go home for a nap.
(Rich had gone with us to look for houses, but he had to go do something technical onsite, so he didn't go to the dinner with us.)
Before we went home, I wanted to drive by and see the house they'd been out looking at, so we went over and looked at the outside, in the dark! It's huge! They were pretty excited about that one, and spent the rest of the night looking at the information the realtor gave them about it, and speculating about the inside.
I went to sleep, and woke up in time to say goodbye to the kids, and come to work. Oh, did I mention that I have about a metric ton of chili leftover? Also, my sweater that I wore all day while I was cooking? It reeks of chili.
11:40 p.m. - 2008-02-23
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