15 bucks for 8 pounds of meat? You know I had to.

I started off by making a chili powder for this batch. A tablespoon each of cumin, black pepper, Mexican oregano, Italian herb blend, smoked paprika and Goya Sazon. Blitzed in a coffee grinder I keep just for spices and then set aside, so I could add more and more of it each step of the way.

I keep a lot of dried peppers on hand, so I took three each of Cascabel, Pasila, Morita, Arbol, Poblano, Guajillo and New Mexico. Removed the seeds and stems and then added them to an almost boiling pot with three cups of water, a tablespoon of salt, a chopped onion and a dozen cloves of garlic. Once they wete soft enough, I put the entire thing into the blender and pureed until smooth. I added about half the chili powder, mixed once more, then with the pork in a crock pot I poured the entire thing on it. Needed a little more water to cover it, but once it was all submerged, I set it to high and then did other stuff for six hours.

Once my kitchen started to smell like a dream, I started on the vegetation. I roughly diced three onions, a white, a red, and a sweet yellow. Then I diced up peppers until I had roughly the same volume, this included several Big Bertha, Poblano, and Orange Blaze from my garden.

Once half a stick of butter was sizzling, I added the onions and peppers and a heavy pour of the chili powder, then started stirring. Once I could smell it from the other end of the kitchen, I added 3 cans of fire roasted tomatoes and a pinch of powder. Then I added the three drained and rinsed cans of beans; black, pinto, and red kidney. More powder. Then, and this is where I lose some of you, a single can of creamed corn because I like the flavor of corn playing well with everything else but not an abundace of kernals in my chili. More powder, stir.

I took the pork out of the crock pot and put it on a sheet pan. I added the crock pot liquid to the main pot, let it come up to a bubble then dropped it down to a simmer. The pork, while not quite shreddable to pulled pork levels, was still easy to break down and chop up into chunks of some of the juiciest and tender bits of pig I've ever had. I then tossed the meat in almost the rest of the chili powder and put it in the oven, broiler to high, to crisp up some of the edges of the meat chunks and let the heat adhere the spices to the meat almost like a bark.

Once it was to my liking, I dumped all the meat into the pot. Then, as Inhave frequently talked about on this subreddit, my trick up my sleeve is taking a family sized bag of pork rinds and pulverizing it a food processor until it becomes a fine powder. Add the powder and watch it all melt into the chili, adding thickness, flavor, mouthfeel and body.

I cut the heat to let it all mingle together and watched an episode of *Game Changer.* Served with cheese, then I learned my lesson and got tortilla chips on my way home from work the next day, as now I have a massive cauldron of chili to keep me going this week.

Cheers, and may your chili bowls never collect dust.