You southerners best be sitting down to read this one...
It's winter. My wife changes her cooking as is appropriate for the season. Chicken soups, beef stews, rump roasts, and chili.
Yesterday the chili had a very new twist. Purists won't say it qualified as chili any longer. That's because my wife experiments with flavors, and yesterday she made "chili" like this:
ground beef browned with usual chili, ochoa, and chipotle (<--I grilled those last summer) pepper seasoning.
Then she added Chianti wine. The dark red, sweet wine. We don't like this wine to drink, too sweet for our taste.
She cooked off a lot of liquid to thicken the wine, then all of it went into the crock-pot.
Four hours later, it was a fiery, spicy, sinus-clearing delight to the taste buds. Kids thinned it with frito chips, sour cream, and sharp cheddar jack cheese. Pictures weren't taken because it was eaten so fast, and it didn't look pretty like Thanksgiving.
Man oh man, it tasted so incredibly good.
But it probably wasn't chili.