d'oh!mestic

My mother is from the Piedmont region of North Carolina, where they take perfectly good hot dogs, smother them in delicious chili and then top that with coleslaw. It is some of the best eating to be had, period.

I know, I know, you’re stumbling over the “topped with coleslaw.” To the uninitiated, it’s like slathering chocolate cake with ketchup — stomach-churningly gross. But life is an adventure, nobody likes a picky eater and my mother always taught me to respect the regional cuisine, so put some damn coleslaw on your chili dogs already.

Or not, because this post really isn’t about having a come-to-Jesus moment with you over the slaw.

This post is about the most fantastic hot dog chili, which is especially timely, given tomorrow’s high holy holiday of Super Bowl Sunday.

All week I had planned on a Friday night where I would come home, open a cold Guinness and make up a mess of chili dogs before settling down on the couch to watch the new X-Files movie.

There were some problems, of course, like where I managed to leave the grocery store without hot dogs or buns, and, um, barbecue sauce for the chili.

And yeah, I remembered that last item just a few minutes before Adam returned from the emergency store run for the hot dogs and buns.

It was a stressful week.

But I am resourceful, sort of, and I have the Gourmet Big Yellow Book of Answers, so I consulted the Big Yellow Book of Answers and came up with their recipe for barbecue sauce and then realized that hell, a little modification would make a fine, straight up chili, which I present to you now.

3 dried red chiles
1 red onion diced
4 cloves garlic, diced
1 14.5 oz can diced tomatoes (drained)
1 2″ length of ginger, minced
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 cup orange juice
1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1/4 cup soy sauce
2 Tbs dried mustard
2 tps cumin
Olive oil
1 pound ground beef
Salt and pepper to taste

In a cast iron skillet, toast the red chiles, turning them when the get hot and the skin color has darkened somewhat. (I did it more off the smell — when it starts smelling like autumn in Albuquerque, turn those suckers). Once toasted, place the chiles in a bowl and cover with hot water just off the boil and allow to soak for five minutes.

In a large pot, throw in the diced tomatoes and about two tablespoons of olive oil and a couple of pinches of salt and let simmer on medium heat.

Meanwhile, slice up the onions and throw into the cast iron skillet with another couple of tablespoons of olive oil and cook until the onion is soft and nearly translucent. Add in the garlic and the ginger and cook on medium low for another couple of minutes, and then add to the pot with the tomatoes.

Dice up the chiles and add them to the tomato mixture.

Throw in the rest of the ingredients, give a good stir and allow to simmer.

Going back to the cast iron skillet, throw in the ground beef and brown, seasoning with garlic powder, onion powder and red chile powder. Once the beef is browned through, add to the tomato mixture and allow to simmer on low heat. At this point, taste the chili. If it doesn’t have quite enough heat, throw in a little red pepper, just to kick up the capsaicin content to reasonable levels.

Add in the hot dogs, pushing them to the bottom of the pot and covering with chili. Allow to cook for five to seven minutes longer. Serve with mustard and coleslaw.

Every couple of years we decide to go to the Fiery Food Show, and every couple of years we remember that, oh yeah, it friggin’ sucks. The crowd’s impenetrable, the sauces on sample are usually not up to par, and someone usually comes out cranky.

This was one of those years we forgot. Or maybe we remembered, but we were being lured to the Sandia Pueblo by the siren song of the Bhut Jolokia, the hottest chile in the world.

I like me a chile that comes with a warning label.

The Bhut Jolokia is rated at over 1,000,000 scovilles of heat. A New Mexico green chile is rated at 1,000 scovilles. A jalepeno is rated 2,500 to 10,o00. Pepper spray is 2,000,000.

This thing is one-half strength mace.

Mmm. Incapacitating.

In addition to the dried pods (no, we haven’t fucked with them . . . yet), Adam bought a package of seeds and a seedling. He has already formulated great plans of hand-raising his new chile plant pet and using it for world domination.

I have no doubt.

If you want to put a little time and tenderness into torturing your own taste buds, New Mexico State University is selling seeds through its Chile Pepper Institute. www.chilepeperinstitute.org.

I give Adam the same piece of hell daily. That is, I very much enjoy reminding him (neener-neener) that while my family’s been parked in New Mexico for generations, he suffered the indignity of being born in Kansas.

Neener-neener.

Seriously. This is the one upper hand I’ve got. I’m as native as you can get (post Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo) and he’s . . . well, he’s from Kansas.

This is an especially fun game because his parents moved to Albuquerque before he was out of diapers and New Mexico is all he’s known. For all intensive purposes, he’s a New Mexican through and through; it’s just that pesky detail of not being born in the 505 that gets his goat every single time.

So I like to mutter things like “Kansas” and watch the vein in his forehead throb and he likes to counter by proving just how New Mexican he really is. He does this by full embracing the gift of our cuisine.

He was well on his way when I met him a zillion years ago. He was rocking the same chile addiction every other New Mexican has; green chile was slopped onto burgers and eggs and tacos without thinking, the hotter the better. Salsa was used in lieu of ketchup. Traveling outside of the state, he would whimper for Tobasco (handy in a pinch and widely availible).

But then last fall, one of his co-workers brought in fresh chile from his chile garden and Adam decided to make salsa. And I know I’ve posted pictures upon pictures of his weekly salsaings, but pictures do not begin to convey the quality of his salsa. Spicy and tasty and hot and delicious. His salsa is some of the best I’ve ever tasted, and I’m not just saying that because he’s sitting six inches to my right. The man can make salsa.

From there, he branched into guacamole. And then enchiladas and fajitas and rellenos. Suddenly it was fall again and we had two bushels of chile spread across two freezers and it doesn’t seem to be enough. Chile has turned from a preference to a hobby to an obsession.

No, that’s an understatement. It’s not just the chile. I do believe his quest in life is to make the entire Gardunos’ menu from scratch and to make it better. Right now, all we need to do is to attempt bizcochitos and tamales for Christmas, and we’ll be set, which is really a subtle, show-off-y way of saying that today we made our own tortillas and sopapillas from scratch.

If you go into Flickr, you’ll see all the notes. Believe me, they’re silly enough to look at.

Also, I’m too tired to figure out how to tie this into the narrative, so I’ll just straight-out pimp this. If you want a piece (heh) of the Wolf chile crazy, check out his mother’s block-of-the-month Chili Sampler quilt. You should totally buy it. You should also totally buy one for every other person you know. It is one of the most creative quilt designs I’ve ever seen and it was thought up by my mother-in-law, which makes it that much more awesome, and also, it’s chile. Did I mention that part?