[cmccuist]

If you're in a chili cook-off in TX, you get disqualified for adding beans.

Here's a couple of tips I use for making chili (I've won a few contests).

Ingredients - chicken broth, dried New Mexico chili peppers, chipotles in adobe sauce, cubed meat, tomatoes, tomatoe paste (don't use tomato sauce), onions

Don't use ground meat! Cube the meat - pork, beef, venison, turkey (not so much). It's always better to have more than one kind of meat. I like a mixture of pork and beef. I brown the cubed meat in butter and add it to the mix.

I use chicken broth as a base. I add everything to a crock pot and slow cook it overnight.

To prepare the dried peppers, I cut off the stems with a scissors, then split the pepper down one side. Remove the seeds and simmer in chicken broth for about five minutes.

Then I take the back side of a knife and scrape the pulpy paste off the pepper skins, puree the paste in a blender or small food processer with chicken broth and add to the mix.

New Mexico chilies are very good to use as they are tasty and come in wide range of Scoville units (hotter isn't always better).

I bought some chilies in Mexico recently. They have a huge selection down south. Better than you can get in the local grocery store. The hard part about making chili is finding good dried chili peppers to use.

I go easy on the chipotles in adobe sauce as it adds a peculiar taste to the mix that overwhelms it. Just dig the chipotles out of the can, pull off the stems, split them, run your finger inside to get the seeds out and puree them with your pepper-pulpy-paste that you made previously.

I use canned, diced tomatoes, but go easy as you don't want a too tomotoey taste.

Chili is dependent on the ingredients. Select your ingredients with care and experiment. Good luck!! It's chili weather!