MY MOUNTAIN CHILI COOKOFF
One time while I was at work and lady friend of mine said that she had an elk neck. She asked if I’d like to have it. I don’t remember how the conversation came around to that, but I said yes, I’d like to have that elk neck. I took it home and didn’t know what to do with it. It was kind of ugly and gray and I think it been in my friend’s freezer for quite a while because she didn’t know what to do with it either. Joan and I talked it over and decided to cook it and try to get the meat off and then figure out what to do with it later. We baked that elk neck for maybe two hours at 350° and brought it out of the oven and tested it.. It was like shoe leather. It was like the elk was getting revenge. You couldn’t cut it, you couldn’t bite it and I thought all was lost. I had an idea. Chinese foil wrapped chicken comes out so tender. Let’s try that idea. We wrapped that elk neck in foil and threw a little water in there before sealing it up to help put a little moisture back into the meat. (those were the days when aluminum foil was completely safe, and cigarettes, and Crisco, and playing with mercury to make quarters shiny.
Again it was baked for two hours at 350°. This time, the foil made the meat just fell off of the bone with luscious moisture and juices. Having succeeded but still not knowing what to do with this meat, it went back into the freezer. I’m a rather crazy bloke so I decided to run with my craziness over this neck. I went to the grocery store and I bought jalapeno peppers, fresh ones. maybe about ten or 15 of the little fellas. I went over to the spice aisle and I bought a bottle of every single spice that there was- but not cayenne pepper. There must’ve been 40 bottles of everything. Some bottles of spice were salted and others were not, it didn’t matter to me. I took these things home and played with the spice first. I opened every bottle of every kind of spice that I could find and I poured everything into a huge bowl. These days you might want to be a little more judicious about that because you don’t want to pour in a big fat bottle of powdered ghost peppers that would so just completely take over. It probably made somewhere between a quart and 2 quarts of what I just called “popcorn salt” because I didn’t know what else to call it. I heard on the radio that there was a mountain music concert and chili cookoff and that sounded like just a hell of a lot of fun, so me and Joan decided we were going to go and enter the chili cooking contest. I took the elk neck that was cooked and tender out of the freezer and combined it with the jalapeno chilis and a ton of cooked kidney beans and my popcorn salt. The chili tasted pretty good and was a hit with us and friends. We got to the mountain festivities early and set up our Coleman and fired up our chili on the table with other competitors. There was fierce competition and everybody must have thought that they had already won because they were drinking beer and celebrating way too early. Okay-I confess, almost each and every one of us was extremely merde faced. It was such a beautiful day . The smell of the pine trees with a touch of smoke in the air and the music and everybody so happy. We all were having so much fun so why not drink beer ? Somebody actually put a ram’s head in their chili competition. I made up my mind I wasn’t going to taste anything like that, it was still raw. …………..Oh, here come the judges and they started tasting everybody’s chili. I don’t think they tasted the one with the raw rams head in it as that was nasty. They tasted everybody’s chili and I was thinking to myself, I bet some of these guys cooked their chili for the last 48 hours and it doesn’t have any flavor left and it. They must be from England, “ It’s still got a little flavor in it, lets boil it some more “. I think I was enjoying the beer and the festivities and the music and I really didn’t give up poopy about winning the contest, but the judges came back and tasted my chili again. ………..They tasted a couple of others — — - but they came back and THEY TASTED MY CHILI AGAIN………… That really got my attention and when they said I won I almost had a cow. They told me I was supposed to follow them to a stage and they told me to walk across the stage and some guy handed me a check for $50 and everybody clapped. I thought Andy Warhol was right and this is my 15 minutes of fame that just came out of nowhere unexpected when I totally didn’t care. If I could do things over again, Joan would’ve walked across that stage too the things were moving fast. I was just there for fun and Joan and I sure got that. We headed back to the chili table to pack up and leave and we were surprised and thrilled to see that every single bit of that chili was gone and had been consumed by everybody at this event. What a great last complement to this unlikely dish created by Joan and Jim Young that we will remember for the rest of our lives.
