Well, here we are in the New Year and it’s time for a challenge! This is the second year I will be participating in Jennifer Nicole Well’s, ‘Color Your World’ Challenge. I have already had one challenge for this year; getting the new blog set up! I hope you like it! Check out all the buttons and pages and let me know what you think! I have added a lot of stuff! It’s going to be a great blogging year!  Now, let’s get a move on to the challenge!

The original chili recipe had no beans in it! What?  Chili refers to a hot pepper.  In the 1850’s, women in San Antonio, Texas, set up stalls ( probably in the square in front of the Alamo) to sell a stew they made from a concoction of meat and a variety of chili peppers, but mostly made from the Chilipiquo pepper, which grew wild on bushes in Texas. Their very thick stew was made from equal parts of meat to peppers. They discovered if they made a hash of dried beef, fat, pepper, salt and chili peppers and formed it into stackable rectangles and then left them in the hot Texas sun, they would be as hard as a brick. Their “chili bricks” could be rehydrated with water. Cowboys soon discovered  the “chili bricks”  and because they could be added to boiling water to make a quick meal,  it became a staple on the trail. “Chili bricks” were especially useful when traveling to and fro to the California gold mines and around Texas.

Now, I have seen enough cowboy movies to know that the trail cooks (you know, the ones in the covered wagons) always served beans as their staple food, because the cowboys in the movies were forever complaining about eating beans, and more beans. My thinking is the trail cook got tired of all this complaining, so he planted pepper seeds, oregano, and onions in mesquite patches along the trail, (to protect them from foraging cattle) to use on future trail drives. So, now the trail cook has beans, onions, oregano, peppers and a “chili brick” to work with! Voila, chili with beans!

I like my chili served over “Fritos” with a generous topping of grated cheddar cheese, a big dollop of sour cream and a scattering of jalapeños. How do you like your chili?

Color your World  is a 4 month long daily blogging challenge event. Each day has a new color theme based on a crayon color in Crayola’s box of 120 crayons.

The challenge runs January 1, 2017 to April 29, 2017. Please join us in this challenge! It’s fun!