Hobo chili is very personal

Hobo chili is very personal
                        

For reasons that are much too silly — and no doubt typical — I ended up back home Sunday with a large order of fast food french fries. They were a day old, cold and probably should have been used to feed the seagulls as my wife and I built our base tans on the beach, but I just couldn’t seem to pull the trigger.

Besides, it’s a rookie mistake to fire food into the air, hoping to see a gull swoop down and catch some morsel in its beak.

Once a tourist starts that kind of process, it doesn’t take long for a flock to form, and, well, you can imagine the chaos that ensues. I mean you’ve seen Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds.”

There’s a lesson to be learned. Ask Tippi Hedren. Birds outnumber humans by billions. We may be higher on the food chain, but there’s something illusory in that evolutionary advantage because, as you know, birds are largely believed to be descendants of the dinosaurs. Or vice versa.

Anyway, my wife stopped at the grocery store, and I did my shopping for the week, deciding that chili would be a fine choice. The problem was that, wiped out and baked from two afternoons in the blazing Carolina sun, I somehow forgot to buy a can of dark red kidney beans, an omission I only realized as I was stocking the kitchen shelves.

Was it stupid? Sure, but because I wasn’t working from a list, it was understandable.

But did it scuttle the culinary enterprise? No way.

You see I’m a firm believer in what I call hobo chili, which has been a staple of my eating habits since I first lived on my own.

Normally chili is pretty basic: some hamburger, tomatoes, an onion and a green pepper with the aforementioned beans, some spices, Tabasco and a nice shredded cheese to add as it's served. But what I’ve discovered over the last 40 years or so is that there’s almost nothing in the way of leftovers that can’t be comfortably added to the mix.

Sausage links, strips of bacon, mushrooms that haven’t gone bad and even the occasional strips of a grilled T-bone steak with the remains of a baked potato, all of these — and many more — have been added to create various versions of hobo chili.

The versatility of this dish serves two purposes: it keeps me alive even as it cuts down on food that gets tossed.

I’ve added the remnants of Chinese takeout, chopped-up hot chicken wings and even a spicy meatball or two.

Where, you might ask, do I draw the line? Well, I’ll let you know when I get there.

Hobo chili is very personal, which reminds me of something that happened when I was 8 years old.

As my third-grade year wound down, the nuns decided that because it was the last week of school and the weather was nice, they’d arrange a sort of picnic on the playground. Normally we ate lunch in a cafeteria, adjacent to the church, and everything was very structured. You walked, single file, from your classroom across the playground and sat, with those in your grade, at long tables.

After a prayer, those who had the money — I think it was 30 cents — headed for the ladies who served up fresh, warm, healthy meals from behind steamer stands. The rest of us sat quietly and, in the colloquial idiom of the day, brown-bagged it.

I felt no stigma, nor did I mind eating the same thing every day. Mom had three mouths to feed, and her assembly-line prep at the kitchen counter worked for her. She didn’t like substitutions or making exceptions, though she sort of agreed with me that grape jelly pretty much ruined a perfectly acceptable peanut butter sandwich.

Add in a bag of corn chips and an apple slice — maybe the occasional chocolate cupcake with a squiggle of white icing on top — and you were ready to face the second half of the school day. But that all changed one May afternoon in 1964 when, as I’ve alluded, we Catholic schoolkids were treated to an outdoor meal on the asphalt.

The parish pulled out all the stops. There was music and balloons and lots of games and prizes, but what I remember most were the hot dogs.

They used to have these machines, glassed in with little racks that rotated like a Ferris wheel. Round and round they turned, and the hot dogs rode around until they were cooked to perfection. I stood there, mesmerized by the complex simplicity of the operation, marveling at the abject brilliance of the concept.

When Mom made hot dogs, she just slashed open the plastic wrapper and threw six of them into a pan of boiling water. So when I saw those weenies turning golden and shining like some kind of miracle, I waited my turn and asked for two. Half expecting to be told that I was breaking some kind of rule, I gratefully accepted them and headed for the condiment stand, where I slathered both in — wait for it — ketchup.

This caused an uproar because everyone else was using mustard. I grinned sheepishly but stuck to my guns because I had no use for mustard, having not yet experienced soft pretzels or egg rolls or a real frankfurter at a real ballpark. Those discoveries were miles down the road.

But as I’ve said, it was a personal decision. Food is like that.

And so it came to pass that the other afternoon, my wife walked into the kitchen and saw me elbow-deep in making my hobo chili. She spotted the three-day-old fast food fries on the cutting board.

“You’re not,” she said before I cut her off with a wave of my hand.

“Yes,” I said, sharpening my knife, “I am.”

And those vagabond french fries softened up, added another taste element and provided a valuable source of fiber to my creation.

My chili, my rules. Pass the ketchup, please.


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