I love diners. I've had the good fortune to live most of my adult life a reasonable distance away from a pretty good one. I've nurtured friendships at diners, looked for jobs at diners, sobered up and nursed hangovers at diners. The best diners reflect the food of the proletariat as it was before it was appropriated by the fast food machine. Black coffee, eggs cooked any way you can imagine and browned toast served with the ubiquitous grape jelly has sustained me in lean times and sent me happy, awake and well fed to untold lectures, exams and staff meetings. If you're feeling spendy, a small sirloin with those eggs (though I hardly ever have felt that way.) Occasionally biscuits and sausage gravy for a little variety. At lunch, sandwiches for the on the go types, french fries with ketchup and the best grilled cheese available, sure; but also tender roast beef and mashed potatoes, chicken fried steak and chicken fried chicken, with white gravy; green beans with the smoky depth of country ham and the piquance of onion. But the single dish that separates the genuine article from the pretenders is a heavenly bowl of red.
It's easy to put chili that's good enough on a diner table; beans, beef and chiles all can well. Open can, schlurp into pot, heat and serve. Really special places will make their own, served piping hot on the Fahrenheit as well as Scoville scales, tender morsels of some sort of meat (usually at diners it's ground beef, but diners can surprise with succulent chunks of roast or steak). I am a devotee of the genre, but I am not a purist; plump red kidney beans and ripe red tomatoes are more than welcome in my chili.
This is really beside the point; it's what's done with chili that I like about diners. The specialty of a place I frequented during my college years was a mountain of delight built on a sturdy base of crispy hash browns, followed by chili and cheese and snow capped by eggs done in the way of your choice. I can tell you there really was no other way to order them than fried, sunny side up. That way a creamy melange of yolk, chili and potato is formed that represents the pinnacle of savory breakfast flavor. But I have to admit it's when chili meets pasta that I really get excited. Most people with even a half-hearted interest in chili have have probably taken the plunge with a chili and spaghetti marriage, if only once, at chain-type establishment such as Steak 'n' Shake. It's adequate there: the chili comes from a can but it's the chain's own recipe, a sort of Cincinnati style chili with distinctive notes of cumin and allspice, with the heretical addition of kidney beans. Perfectly acceptable in my book. As the traditional Cincinatti chili has no beans, Steak and Shake's Chili Five Way is named properly, but as far as I know ingredient number five, kidney beans, is there no matter what. A mere technicality. Chili, spaghetti, shredded cheddar and diced raw onion are only improved upon with the addition of the green chile vinegar, the point of which I couldn't fathom until I first doused a five way with it.
Today, we were celebrating my eldest son's twelfth birthday. Pizza and my wife's delicious chocolate Charlotte left us feeling content but a tad over-stuffed. By the time dinner time rolled around, there was no interest in an organized meal, so we fended for ourselves. We had leftovers from recent Mexican and Italian family meal excursions, and an idea popped into my head: Chili Five Way. But there was no "chili" per se. Could I pull it off with leftovers anyway?
This is what I had at my disposal, and went into the chili five way:
Salsa fresca (diced homegrown chiles, tomatoes and onions)
Enchilada sauce (homemade, made from ancho chiles)
Taco beef (ground chuck, slow cooked in vegetable broth, paprika, cumin, garlic powder, salt and pepper)
vermicelli
shredded cheddar
Heinz Chili sauce
On a plate, I piled on some vermicelli, added a generous dollop of enchilada sauce, a half cup of taco beef, and two shakes of the chili sauce. I mixed and topped with the salsa and then the cheddar and off to the microwave it went.
It was good! As fresh salsa and ancho chiles are staples around here, my chili recipe may have just changed forever.
