Column: Get heated up

Within my dad’s personal office, there is a book. Typically it stands tall and upright alongside our cookbooks in our bookshelves in the dining room, but this past weekend it lay on his desk, amidst work notes and papers. It is a chili cookbook, and I absolutely adore it.

“Chili Nation,” written by Jane and Michael Stern, is a cookbook devoted to chili recipes found in every state in the United States. Each state has a different recipe, even if it only varies slightly from others. At the end of the book, there are other recipes for side dishes.

But this past weekend, as with all other times my family has thumbed through the book, we only chose to make one recipe: Wyoming’s Code 10 Chili, the chili that can truly set your insides on fire and leave embers within for days if you add too many
jalapeños.

This is my dad’s chili.  

No, he may not have come up with it out of thin air or developed it with help from others’ influences, but it is his chili, and man, do I love the stuff.

It started a few years back, when we originally bought the book. I don’t recall why we ended up buying it in the first place, or how or why we came to starting with the Wyoming recipe.

I would assume it’s because the recipes sounded good and Code 10 sounded like it didn’t belong in Wyoming.

The authors wrote that they had gotten this recipe from a Wyoming resident who was originally from Santa Fe, N.M. It may hardly seem authentic, but that doesn’t make it any less delicious.

My dad took it upon himself one bitterly cold night to make the chili. Potatoes, chilies, spices, jalapeños, spicy sausage, onion and many other ingredients eventually found their way into a giant pot with steam that could clear out your sinuses if you breathed it in enough. The recipe suggested sour cream to top and tortillas on the side to cut the heat and protect your stomach lining.

I exaggerate the spiciness a tad bit. It’s only ridiculously spicy when you add too many fresh jalapenos, especially with their seeds. Then again, I’m the girl who drinks out of hot sauce bottles.

Regardless of the spiciness, Dad created a new family favorite, and it’s now a winter standby in our house. It’s a hearty chili, unlike anything else, and I beg for it every time I’m home for Christmas.  

This past Christmas, we didn’t get the opportunity to make it while I was home, but I craved the chili all winter. So this weekend, I went home and had Dad make
me chili.

I don’t care if it’s almost April; the fact that it was snowing last week tells me it’s chili weather.

I didn’t copy the recipe or find it online, but I do recommend you check out the cookbook. Besides the Code 10 chili, there’s a mean garlic chili from California that looks delightful.

And thank you, Dad, for indulging my need for heat once more before the end of my junior year.