Cookin’ Chili

Post author:Darrell Yardley
Post published:September 22, 2020
Post category:Cooking

Sunday felt like a chili cooking day. Here is one of my favorites, comes from Robb Walsh’s Chili Cookbook:

It’s El Real’s Chili Con Carne (on page 87). Starts out with frying up 8 oz of bacon and chopping it up. Then you brown your ground chuck (or beef) in the dripping’s oil, followed by your onions. Never mind the cholesterol. Even make my own chili powered from my garden chilis (p 11). Ground my own chuck roast using a new grinder attachement for my Kitchen Aid mixer. That was the cat’s meow, I’m telling you. Ground it into chili grind size in nickity-split. May start grinding my own sausage now it was so easy. Already make my own Chorizo sausage from ground pork from the store, but this way I can control the amount of fat in it.

Anyway, this is not gringo chili. It’ll put hair on your chest, so to speak. Want to cut back on the cumin a little next time though. Forgot this from the last batch I cooked last winter. You know, short-term memory is the first to go…. Now, where was I? Oh, yeah,

Also, cooked some pinto beans to go with it, AND a skillet of stone ground corn bread, also from Walsh (p 185). Great meal!! Wish you had been here to help me enjoy it.

Next up on my chili cooking: green chili using Hatch’s green chilis. Have to wait till I finish this batch though.

Chop water, carry wood is a blog by Darrell G. Yardley, PhD, LPC, focusing on wide variety of topics on spirituality and science, Zen Buddhism, secular religious naturalism, Native American spirituality, and science (psychology, evolution, genetics, neurobiology, chaos theory). Defining spirituality as a combination of the cultivation of inner-peace and personal growth.

Promoting simplicity, mindfulness, self-sufficiency, self-reliance, self-actualization, inner-peace, personal growth, and eco-responsibility. My credo is: reduce, repair, repurpose, recycle, and compost. I will take up a range of topics including gardening, bicycling, and whatever topics are on my mind.

Having just finished my second book, The Guru on the Mountain, which shortly will be available on Amazon.com, I am working toward another with a working title, Buddha on a Bike, about my increased interest and involvement in bicycling, the adventures thereon, and relevant to the above topics.

The blog’s title is a wordplay based on an old Zen proverb: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

What does it mean? There are several layers of meaning to this old, pithy saying. One one level it means that the world does not change when we become “enlightened”. We still must do the work we need to do from moment to moment. The world doesn’t change, but we do, or rather, our perspective and response to the world changes. After enlightenment, the world is still just, the world. It just is. At another level, it is telling us to be fully present in each moment, i.e. to be mindful, no matter what our task.

It is about living your regular life, but from a different perspective and understanding. A spiritual life does not require that we shave our heads, live in the desert, give up all possessions, etc. We can live our regular life, only different; with mindfulness, less attachment, letting go into each moment, then letting it go into the next, realizing that all is impermanent. Being more relaxed, less uptight, realizing that nothing is permanent, everything changes. Less judgmental.

My wordplay is that you can’t of course, chop water, not unless of course it is its solid form of ice. So, my wordplay is a paradox built upon the Zen paradox, known as koans. Koans are Zen word puzzles that are directed to helping students (that be all of us) to obtain enlightenment.

Hopefully my words will help you in this endeavor in your own journey. If not, at least maybe a little enjoyment. Gassho

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