Got a line drawing of the prototype for my "Fat Dragon Brewing Co." logo sitting on a desk at home. Planning on scanning it and maybe colorizing it a bit in GIMP and then putting a dinky little shrunk-down version on here tonight, if I remember.
That did not resize well (it's not all that great to begin with, but shrinking from 3000px to 150px didn't work out all that favorably). Maybe stick with a white background to minimize the ugliness around the edges... Blue definitely wasn't working.
Hey wise guy, I don't know chinese or whatever them funny symbols are. Is that Chinese for cat?
The competition was garbage. At the end we could all sample the the contestants chili and mine was way better than the winner and runner up. I know I'm biased but it just was. Never entered a chili cook off again though so may have just been one bad day. Seriously though, you make your chili how you want. I use those recipes as a base and still throw extras in to extend it like celery, carrots, beans etc etc. Man you can make chili outta anything. Best cooking is cooking without a recipe or guidelines.
If I lived a few hundred kilometers further south, that might be a yes. Dog would have been a legitimate guess, though. I probably wouldn't use dog in a chili, though: costs more than goat and tastes almost identical.
You probably think I'm joking, heh heh... Actually, that's the Chinese for the stewed beef tripe I was talking about: they do the same thing with many meats and other foods. I've never done it but with hard boiled eggs so I could be a bit off base with some of the particulars for doing it to meat, but basically you take a metric butt-ton of whole spices, simmer them together into a stock, and simmer big chunks of meat in it for a period of time, then I believe you hang the meat to cure a bit. Makes for some really tasty stuff.
Cooking without a recipe is my favorite, but I usually end up making things pretty much the same way each time.
For chili, it's half a kilo dried beans soaked overnight; three or four largish anaheim and/or sweet red peppers (usually with a couple smaller, spicier ones for a bit of kick) steamed and seared in a pan or wok and then blended to a chunky puree; quarter- to half-kilo of corn kernels; roughly one medium onion and three medium tomatoes, diced; quarter-kilo of wind-dried beef belly cubed and then seared in a wok over high heat in its own fat with a bit of salt; another quarter kilo of stewed beef tripe sliced in roughly 1x5cm strips and seared in the remaining fat; small mounds (probably a couple tablespoons) of cumin and chili powder, and about half that much salt. Now that I've got some bulk spices for making sausages, I'm starting to work other flavors in there as well - sage being my favorite so far but I'm also very hopeful for mustard seed and some others.
All the prep happens the night before; washing, cutting, cooking, blending; the beans soak in a pot and everything else finds its way into a big container in the fridge overnight (though it might be interesting to cook them overnight next time and add the beans in the morning, hmm...). In the morning, everybody goes into the ~3-4L crock pot (it's always a tight fit) with a couple bottles of beer filling in the gaps, maybe the grounds from my Aeropress coffee that morning if I think about it, and a bit more water to reach the top. Turn it to "slow cook", go to work, come home ten hours later to some killer beans 'n' meat.