Sometimes things work out and other times you just empty the fridge into a pot and give the old dial a hearty twist. When it comes up to temp you serve it (in solitude). Tonight I looked through the pantry and realized I had nearly everything I needed to make Chili which would save me a trip to the store in the rain. I threw in one slab of hamburger (I fill 1 gallon freezer bags with a 1/2 inch thick square of hamburger and freeze it, they stack like sheets of plywood), two cans of whole tomatoes pulsed in the food processor, onions, bell peppers, tons of chile powder, cumin, coriander, garlic and so on. After having it simmer for an hour I gave it a sip and I was swept back to my childhood memories of navy green kitchen cabinets and brown shag carpet. You might not see the connection quite yet so I'm going to help you out a little (this one's a freebie but you can show your gratitude by sticking a thank-you note to the invoice of a 2010 Mustang GT and send it to the usual address). The thing that both the chili and the my childhood memories have in common is their lack of taste. Oooh! you say. Try and keep up, the clocks a ticking.  So it seems my chili powder had turned to chilly powder. After much deliberation I added another quarter of a cup - call it a stimulus package if you will as it yielded the expected results - everything pretty much stayed the same. The cans of tomatoes were 99c grocery outlet random brand which seemed to be getting most of their flavor from the water they were packed in. Remind me to send off a letter to random brand to beef up the tomato flavoring in their water. Long story short - simmering it longer only lessened the cleansing nature of drinking 8 glasses water a day and boiling the hell out of it only resulted in the same amount of hell taking up a smaller amount of space. We have a rule in our house that on certain days we eat monastery style. This means that if anyone opens their big mouth they find themselves without a place to sleep. This was one of those times.

Thankfully you can always count on the act of "breaking bread" to save the day. The term breaking bread always reminds me of that time in Paris where I thought I was smarter than the French and tried to buy two baguettes on Saturday so I could eat one on Sunday when my boulangerie was closed. Breaking bread is not entirely accurate as the bread was the one opening a can of whoopass on everything it was whacked against. Our bread had no cause to be broke as it was made of corn and fried nicely in a cast iron skillet heated until the lard (yes I said it - lard) in the bottom was smoking. Piper also broke bread in the form of bagel dough turned mini-loaves. Seems the bagel dough was very wet and difficult to work with (sounds like someone I used to know) so she stuffed it into mini dutch ovens and it cooked up nicely. Someone needs to remind her about greasing and flowering her mini-dutch ovens though as the bread and the vessle in which it was cooked were tighter than Sonny and Cher which could only be separated by using one very hard object and a great deal of energy. I'm still talking about the bread here - try to stay focused.

Overall things worked out as they always do. Tomorrow I will attempt to save the leftovers, no pun intended.