Photos of two happy couples at the Halloween party we went to Saturday night.

Everybody’s got a chili recipe, and so I thought it would be apt to start out my souper Sunday posts with mine. Plus I woke up with a yucky cold, and this one-pot recipe is a good one for when you want a robust stew that is easy to put together. And, it’s very pretty!

1-2 T olive oil
1 c chopped onion (1 small-med. onion)
1 T crushed garlic (about 2 med. cloves)
1 c chopped green peppers
2 15 oz. cans peeled and diced tomatoes, with juice (or 3 c fresh)
1 T. tomato paste
1 15 oz. can black beans, drained
1 15 oz. can navy or cannellini or great northern beans, drained
1 15 oz. can dark kidney beans, drained
1 c frozen or fresh corn
3 c chopped cooked chicken
1 T or more chili powder
1 t salt
pepper to taste
1/2 t cinnamon
Hot stuff to taste- see notes below

Use a big pot! Saute the onions in the olive oil for a few minutes. Add the green peppers and garlic and saute a couple of minutes more. Add EVERYTHING else. Bring to a simmer, and let it cook until the flavors meld, at least 20 minutes. Stir and taste test often. This is one of those dishes that taste better with time.

Notes:
All of these amounts of ingredients can be adjusted up or down according to your tastes. I mean, it’s CHILI.

Green peppers - You can use green bell peppers for all or part of this recipe, depending on your tolerance for spicy heat. Because I cooked this with ingredients from my garden, I used half sweet bell pepper, a couple of banana-like sweet peppers (don’t know the name, but they are kind of like “fish” peppers), and a couple of mild “Tam” jalapenos. Now, I know that there seems to be little point in a mild jalapeno, and I grew these out of curiosity. They are wonderful - a thick walled crunchy, almost sweet, pepper.

Tomatoes - If you use tomatoes out of your garden, you can peel them quickly and easily by making a little cut on one end and dunking them in a pot of boiling water for just one minute. This works great for Romas and Juliets, but not Sungolds. I used Juliets, Jellybeans, and one Mortgage Lifter when I last made this recipe.

Beans - You can use dried beans in this recipe if you substitute about 1 1/2 c of cooked beans per can. Remember that you’ll need to soak your beans ahead of time, probably overnight.

Hot Stuff - I used a small, minced, seeded habenero pepper in this recipe. Believe me, it was enough. I estimated that it was about 1 1/2 t. Habeneros are one of the hottest edible peppers. The seeds and the pith are the hottest parts of a hot pepper. IMPORTANT: After handling hot peppers, immediately wash your hands thoroughly with soap and water. You won’t have to be told this twice if you rub your eye first.

Alternatively, you can use cayenne pepper. Remember that the hot effect of cayenne pepper is cumulative, meaning that your mouth will heat up more and more as you eat. Or your favorite hot pepper sauce, or if you’re using canned tomatoes you can substitute one or both cans with tomatoes with diced hot peppers, such as Rotel.

Of course, I recommend that you do as I did and use local and/or organic ingredients for everything as much as possible!

Source list
Olive oil, onion, garlic, tomato paste, and beans: Deep Roots Market
Green and hot peppers and tomatoes: My back yard and front porch
Corn: Earth Fare
Chicken: Back Woods Farm, Wesley Peterson, farmer
Seasonings: Earth Fare, Harris Teeter, and Deep Roots Market

I am dedicating this Tar Heel Tavern Halloween entry to my very funny, scary, and extremely good-natured husband.

Ooh, scawy. Taken at his place of employment, October 31, 1985. (He didn’t get the raise, by the way.)

The hostile people waiting in line at this Renaissance Festival photo booth around 1990 didn’t think that we were funny. How can we not be funny? We were funny.

Busch Gardens, around 1997. I’m jealous. He’s prettier than me. Now that’s scary.

When we stopped for a six-pack of Sam Adams on the way to this Halloween party in 2001, the customers at Harris Teeter definitely thought that he was funny. (By the way, I am NOT this ruddy and fat! Just a little ruddy and plump.)

Men in drag are funny. They just are. From Milton Berle to Tootsie, from Monty Python to the Kids in the Hall. My apologies to you male cross-dressers out there, but you have got to be PRETTY good at make-up not to be funny in drag. Heck, I look pretty funny in make-up and women’s clothes myself. Why aren’t women in men’s clothes funny? It’s because modern men’s clothes AREN’T FUNNY.

I think that the fashion designers should get to work on this.

Ah, the smell of burnt chicken wings in the afternoon! I write that for the benefit of those of you who might have the misconception that I am a good cook just because I write about food. But that’s what I get for following a recipe. I did get a good soup stock made and I froze most of it in two-cup portions to use for rice. I used the tips from the chicken wings and the stash of vegetable trimmings and chicken bones I’ve been squirreling away in the freezer for the last few months.

I keep rising like a phoenix today from my killer headache to do a little here, a little there, then I go crashing down like a ton of bricks for an hour.

For example, I meant to get so much done in the garden today. It is such a lovely day! The frost this week took out those nasty skeeters, but it wasn’t enough to kill my plants off yet. The garden is at the point where it looks very scruffy and it could use some cosmetic work. I pulled up most of the field pea vines, but left a few just so I can see how long they’ll keep going. We need to work on our wood pile - there are a lot of pieces too long to fit in the woodstove.

The drought and Mama Kitty pretty much took care of my fall garden plans. No fresh salad greens for us this fall! I do have a few carrots coming up. Just for kicks I planted a few collard, hollyhock, and honesty seeds. I don’t expect anything to come of them, but hey, I might end up pleasantly surprised. That would be an easy cheap thrill for me. The warm spell might last past this week, but I’m afraid that the dryness will too. (The hollyhock and honesty seeds are for next year’s garden.)

I have managed to keep my new fruit trees watered sufficiently, I hope, so that has been the highlight of this season’s planting. This winter will bring a lot of structural and design work - the elimination of the rest of the grass by mulching with cardboard, newspaper, and straw, new wood chip paths, and supports for my beans, peas and other vines.

I accept this gift of one hour gratefully today, but I don’t think that I’ll be so happy when I start walking home from work in the dark.

Happy birthday to Kiri from Squ!rt the Buddha Kitty! This is a shot of baby Squ!rt. He’s all grown up now!

This is my first entry in the Weekend Cat Blogging carnival. Visit Clare and Kiri at Eat Stuff to check it out. Here’s what’s up with this:

“Each weekend food Bloggers around the world share pictures of their cute cats. Just send your permalink in a comment to Clare at Eat Stuff and add a “Weekend Cat Blogging” tag to your post.”

There’s a Weekend Dog Blogging carnival for food bloggers, too, at Sweetnicks.

Now if there were just a Weekend FISH Blogging carnival. Hmmmm. I guess that’s a little confusing for foodies.

Nice!

Two of the Smithsonian’s 35 Who Made a Difference:
Wendell Berry
Andy Goldsworthy

Man, yesterday was “Take Back Your Time Day” and I didn’t even realize it until I read it in the News and Record late last night! I was too busy to read the newspaper until then - isn’t that ironic.

Umbra’s Perfect Eco-Day: Umbra had a really good column in Grist yesterday, because it has zillions of links to her other columns on things you can do to green your world. But as much as I like her, I don’t like her constant admonishments that we are too hung up on the little environmental choices.

I believe that the little choices are important and meaningful, if for no other reason than that they make us feel better and keep us focused on doing good. For all of our choices, big and small, affect everything else. You might ask, what difference does it make if I throw this can into the trash instead of the recycling bin? My question to you is, what if everybody made that choice? Recycling happens one can at a time.

Mining Umbra’s latest column will reveal all kinds of goodies, such as this column on my big bugaboo, Roundup. A few years ago somebody who should have known better swore up and down to me that Roundup was organic. I wonder where these wild rumors get started? Oh yeah, the Monsanto propaganda machine. You must resist Monsanto.

Speaking of corporate evil, apparently boycotts and constant yelping does help: Wal-Mart to announce energy-conscious goals. Then again, it sho’ don’t seem to be hurting them none.

“‘Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen!
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Beau–ootiful Soo–oop!
Beau–ootiful Soo–oop!
Soo–oop of the e–e–evening,
Beautiful, beautiful Soup!’

‘Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish,
Game, or any other dish?
Who would not give all else for two
Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
Beau–ootiful Soo–oop!
Beau–ootiful Soo–oop!
Soo–oop of the e–e–evening,
Beautiful, beauti–FUL SOUP!’”

As sung by the Mock Turtle in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

I always look forward to a chill in the air, although not as much this year since we have gas heat. I’m a big boned gal and sweaters suit me much better than spaghetti straps. If the seasons were reversed and my garden’s growing season was when it is cold, I’d be a much harder worker. But the main reason I look forward to cold weather is soups and stews!

Just look at the treasure trove of soup recipes and lore that I found when I googled for the lyrics to one of my favorite childhood poems: Soupsong.com. They even have a category for deathbed soups!

I didn’t get around to writing it up yesterday, but my plan until around the end of March is to write up a different soup or stew that I have concocted every Sunday. (These will be chatty recipes, since I can’t resist parenthetical comments.) I’ll post them here, and I’ll set up an archive of just my food writing on another blog called The Mock Turtle’s Song.

Here’s the challenge for me: measuring. I know that there are a certain number of you who needs measurements. I know that, and I understand that, because when I first learned to cook, I needed them too. And I was broke all the time, so I didn’t want to ruin what might be my sustenance for the week! I will try very, very hard to measure ingredients and make notes of them. You must keep in mind, however, that making soup is much more fun when you don’t.

When I get time, I’d like to continue with my self-education in artisan bread baking, so I’ll try to keep you apprised of my misadventures in that realm. After all, you’ll need bread to sop up the last few drops of soup in your bowl.

UPDATE January 2007: All the posts from the Mock Turtle’s Song can be found under Recipes now.

It’s been hectic over here at …slowly she turned this week. I found these plans for a time machine on the Internet and thought that it might be a nice diversion to take a little trip down memory lane. Let’s set the timer back to around 1942 or so and work our way back to the present. Hope this works!

Over at A Fine Dish, Zha K muses over an old cookbook titled Anyone Can Bake given to her by her grandmother, and ponders the definition of “grandma,” as well as the relative meaning of “old.”

Jude shares an old photo of her dad at Sylvan Beach and tells us the story of his connection with “Cactus Dick” in An Oldie but a Goodie. You can’t resist that one, can you?

Gator fan Jim Caserta discovered that memories can be priceless when he resisted selling a ticket and ended up attending his Favorite Football Game in the Swamp back in 1995.

Lilburne at Words Fitly Spoken decided that graphic artists shouldn’t get to have all the fun, and he penned a script for an anime adventure on another blog last January, which he re-posted on his blog this week. In his own words: “Caution: This script is filled with sexism, perversion involving (inter alia) robots, wildly offensive stereotyping, and puns beneath the dignity of a third-grader. The reader has been duly warned.”

I can’t say much about this one, because I’m all choked up. At the Nearest Distant Shore, Terri-Lynn misses her daddy in an eloquent post from January, 2005.

Then, in February, Ron posted a poem entitled Schnauzer Song, that given the events of the last couple of months and coming up, is very appropriate today.
Don’t try to communicate with me before I’ve had my coffee. Seriously. This is one of a series of entries I made about my week at John C. Campbell Folk School this past May.

In June, Justin gave us The View from the Cheap Seats with an innovative Proposal for a New Caucus System in Cabarrus County that will be sure to capture the mainstream media attention.

In August, Erin at Poetic Acceptance shared with us a treasured book with a poem that affected the rest of her life: Sleeping with Carl Sandburg. I love that poem, too.

Billy the Blogging Poet fantasized about Talking Trees in September. We’d better shut this thing down, dontcha think, before Billy starts hallucinating again?

Whew! We’re back to the present, and time travel can really knock the wind out of you. In Alex Wilson’s case, it gave him his first migraine with an aura! Sorry about that, Alex!

Perhaps this will help. A time traveler needs comfort food that sticks to the ribs. News and Record food blogger Mel reminisces about the food of her Southern past and shows us how to make good old biscuits and sausage gravy.

After all, you’ll need your strength back to deal with the news of the present day. The Scrutiny Hooligans lay out the facts about the Tom DeLay prosecution (and prosecutor) and call for a North Carolina Congressman to return Tom’s PAC money in: Charles Taylor Hearts Tom DeLay.

Greensmile Dysanthope at The Executioners Thong gets to the bottom of his idealism in a post about decision-making in a time of high emotions, that includes an old-but-good excerpt from a letter from Einstein to Freud.

My slow food bud, George at Dirty Greek thinks that “it’s important to realize that living things deserve respect and deserve to live good lives before we use them for sustenance, clothing, etc.” His call for truth in the middle ground between industrial meat and textile production and animal rights activism is written up in The WTO and Animal Rights.

Wow! What a great response to the Tavern this week! By the way, the wonderful graphics are from Dmitri Rakov. Thanks!

UPDATE: These photos were taken at Luther Britt Park in Lumberton, N.C. next to the levee. Most of the Lumber River has been designated a wild and scenic river, although I don’t think it applies to this part. Here’s more information from the National Park Service site.