Chilly Chili Here On The Georgia Coast

Who's Idea Was This Anyway???


If you could watch a TV commercial about our "working vacation" like they do for the credit card companies it would go something like this:


Eight hours on the interstate =

$35.00 in gas

Two six hour days spent making sawdust and foam chips on the back deck overlooking the marsh at Blackwater Grill =

$0.00

A Saturday on our little Island cooking Chili against 26 other teams...

PRICELESS.

The good news is the preparations are pretty much over with--with the singular exception of moving 70 pounds of pre-cooked meat, 15 gallons of home made chicken and beef stock, and all of the other associated accoutrement's and tools about three miles across the island from the restaurant to the scene of the crime event location adjacent to the "Old Casino" within a hundred yards of the Atlantic Ocean beginning at 6 AM this morning in anticipation of setting it all up then...

cooking TWELVE GALLONS of my soon to be world famous Chili recipe.

I've learned that there is no way that an individual could accomplish this feat without association with a restaurant and one or more professional chef's.

I have to give Blackwater's Chef Jamie a shout out here for spending two days cooking the home made chicken and beef stock down from the raw ingredients and rendering out thirty pounds of ground beef.

John--the restaurant owner and fellow GT alumni--and I rendered the forty pounds of boneless top round roast down mid-day today after he spent the morning hand cutting out 1/2" steaks and close trimming the fat and gristle out of everything.

Then Pat did yeoman's duty handling a paint brush and keeping ahead of me doing the fine finish details, and little Missy the Turbo Pup stood guard over the entire proceedings and gave the stray cats and birds that ventured too close to our efforts a good barking.

So now it's time to do a little reading of the news on the Internet and see what my fellow bloggers are up to for a few minutes, then we're off to complete our adventure which began over a year ago when I received the invitation to be guest chef in last year's event but we had to cancel because I ended up spending a month in the hospital and one of John's employees died in an auto accident the week before the event (as I wrote about here in this link.)

I guess that we'll see y'all later with pictures and the recipe.

Wish us luck...If you will...