Food: Hey, chili's a personal thing

I should be writing about the book I read for the Book a Month group I joined. I read the book and finished it last weekend. Instead, I'm going to talk about last night's dinner.

Chili is a personal thing, I think. Everyone had their own recipe and there's so much debate about what goes in there- beans? No beans? Peppers? Cheese? Even in my family, my gran has one chili recipe, my mother has another and I even have my own. My gran's is actually my grandfather's, it's a recipe he brought home from the army. There's even two secret ingredients and if I told you, she'd kill me. One, though, I'm pretty sure she came up with because I'm guessing the army didn't have them back then. I don't know. My mother's chili recipe came from a lady type magazine, either Good Housekeeping or BH&G, I'm a thinking. I remember being in college when my mother tried it and we all loved it so that's the one she stuck with. When I moved away I missed my mother's chili so she sent me the recipe. It's great, I printed off the e-mail and it's quirky, just like my mom. I love it. I thought about making it last night when I made chili for dinner but, you know, the Husband loves my chili so that's what I went with.

My chili recipe came from a recipe group I was in back in grad school. It's called Autumn Afternoon Chili and the recipe looks something like this:

1 lb hamburger
2 small shallots
1/2 t crushed red pepper
16 oz can tomato sauce
salt
pepper
chili powder
2 t chives
basil to taste
garlic or garlic salt
2 C grated cheese

However, over years of evolution it now looks like this:

2 lbs hamburger (because this recipe makes nowhere near enough)
one palmful dried minced onion (apparently I am Rachael Ray, with the palmful there)
two shakes of cayenne pepper (I hate crushed red pepper. Cayenne gives it a better kick)
2 16 oz cans of tomato sauce and one can of diced tomatoes (we just added the diced tomatoes last night because I decided it needed more texture)
kosher salt
pepper
a palmful of chili powder (the original recipe said "to taste". A palmful is my taste)
a palmful of basil, plus a couple shakes later
a couple shakes of garlic salt
just throw cheese in until it looks right. Note: this depends on the cheese.

The procedure is pretty much the same as the original recipe calls for, brown the ground beef with the salt, pepper, minced onion and basil, then drain the grease off. Dump in the tomato products and give it a stir. Add the remaining spices and stir some more. The cheese part gets a bit tricky. We never seem to have the same cheese in our fridge twice, so this part always changes. The cheese they recommend is Swiss and I will say, Swiss cheese does give it a good taste. It's good for giving a bit of bulk to the chili. Tastewise it's okay. Mozzarella is also super good and bulks the chili up a lot. Last night we had neither, so we threw in the last two fistfuls of a bag of taco cheese and that was okay.

Usually when there's chili there's one of three things- texas toast, cheddar biscuits or cornbread. We didn't have any texas toast in the freezer (whose house is this? There's pretty much always texas toast in the freezer at my house!) and I was too lazy to make cheddar biscuits (the Red Lobster kind, mmmmm!) so cornbread it was. Made from Jiffy mix. Brings back memories of being a kid and my mom making it after school for a snack. Last night's dinner tasted so good, and it was perfect for the cold windy night it turned out to be.