A Little Epiphany - (and a newbie delurking)

[Dia]

I am making up a crockpot of chili today. I planned it early in the week, but the weather cooperated fabulously today. It's not cold by anyone's standards except for those of us here in SoCal where we break out the mittens and parkas if it drops below 55 degrees. The weather up until yesterday was sunny and quite warm, very Indian summer. Today, however, we are fogged in hard with mist so thick you can feel the individual droplets on your skin. H calls this "Dia weather".

The colder nights have triggered the autumn cycle in the garden, with many of our plants beginning to die back even though there's still fruit on the vine. We'll get a few more tomatoes, a few more squash and peppers, but soon we'll need to turn things under and plant winter crops - lettuces, onions, carrots, snow peas, etc.

We don't have a fireplace but I wish we did. Weather like today calls for a nice fire. I may invest in a chimnea/firepit for the deck, but if we ever do a significant remodel on this house a fireplace will be in my list of must-haves.

H really loves that I cook. When the onions hit the pan today he wandered in all sniffing and curious. We debated the finer points of css while we talked about de-glazing pans and the relative merits of stainless steel vs. cast iron. It was very... homey. Very settled in and cozy-feeling if that makes any sense.

I have to go out today for an errand or three, so hopefully I'll do it soon enough to pick up the fixins for corn bread. A good chili deserves corn bread with real butter. My culinary roots are a geographical melange. My mother's family is very Southern on her mother's side, with a dash of Pennsylvania and New Orleans on her father's side. My father's people are mid-western Scots-Irish to the core. And me, I waited tables in a Tex-Mex restaurant all through college and have welcomed California influences such as tri-tip, Asian fusion and Napa Valley wines. So despite the fact that is would turn my Southern relatives in their graves, I make a sweet cornbread when I make chili. For me, the sweet balances out the hot in the chili.