Saturday, May 19, 2012

Crunchy Chili

Back in 1999, I spent a month in Mexico with a missionary family. The wife, Jan, went back to the States to visit family, and my friend Emily and I were left in charge of the household. We were to make the midday meal every day for the men.

One day we decided to make chili--nice, easy recipe we knew by heart, right? So we made the grocery list and sent Marshall to the market. He came back with a bag of dried beans. What on earth are these, we both said. We'd never seen beans that weren't in a can. And to further complicate the issue, the instructions were written in Spanish.

We got out our Spanish-English dictionary and started translating, only to discover these things had to be soaked overnight! It's now 10:00 and lunch is at 1:00. We did the only thing we could think of: threw the beans into a pot of boiling water for the next three hours. We prepared everything else for the meal and waited until the last second to add the beans to the soup.

We held our breath while Marshall, Loren, and Josue took a bite. No one said a word. We breathed a sigh of relief and took our own bites. CRUNCH!

We laughed so hard we had tears streaming down our faces for the entire meal, and yet the guys were very good sports and ate the whole pot.

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