This was the reason behind the chili (see previous post). We promised to my dad's uncle boss (peer of his boss) to show him real Texas chili, i.e. spice-y and beanless. Because we were making Texas chili, the whole meal had to be somewhat Texas themed. We had Cerveza beer, straight from Mexico, a pot of pinto beans, watermelon, and a shoofly pecan pie. Note, I wanted a regular pecan pie, but shoofly indicates that it is made with molasses, and so Rebecca and my dad were saying that it would be more interesting. We didn't even touch it, but more on that later. Note again, we did not bake said pie, there was a bakery not half a mile from the condo.
Anyway, we skipped yoga on Saturday to get ready for the party, buy a small table, chairs, and tablecloth for the 3 small male children, cook both an adult batch and a child's batch of chili, I will elaborate in the next paragraph, start the beans, and buy all sorts of produce and whatnot at the market, and Landmark. We also skipped church this morning to set up for the party, for example, we needed to reheat the chili, clean the house, set up the kid's table, clean the house, fry up some appetizer balls that we got from the market, and then sit around for about an hour and a half before the guests came.
Adult chili: thanks to our good friends at Wick Fowler and the TSA, I brought three boxes of chili "mix" to the Philippines. It is pretty much a box with bags of different spices that you can add a little or a lot of to your chili. There are things like salt, dried onions and garlic, cumin/oregano (in same bag), chile powder (powder made from ground dried chiles like Guajillo, Ancho, etc.), red pepper, or cayenne, masa for thickening, and probably more, I just don't remember. We also added tomato sauce because we couldn't find regular canned tomatoes. I sweated some onions and garlic and browned about a kilo (2.2 pounds) of ground beef. Add some water, let it stew, and done.
Children's chili: To preface this, I felt bad letting my stepmom feed this to the kids. It was pretty much tomato sauce (all of which is sweet, by the way), some ground meat, some onions and garlic, and dashes of chile powder and adobo seasoning (flavored salt). I was saying, but this isn't chili, it's thick meat sauce. She replied with they are Australian, so they don't have much of a tolerance for spice, and they are little kids (3, 5, 8) so they are going to eat sweet things.
Appetizer balls: We found a lady at the market yesterday, Anita, who made savory profiterole type things. They weren't exactly profiteroles because it wasn't the right kind of dough, but they were similar in that they were dough pockets with filling inside. We got two bags of 12 of white truffle cream. They tasted like mild cheese balls (not the neon orange things).
Around 1:00, the guests arrived, my dad's uncle boss, his wife and three kids. Right off the bat, the kids were wrestling or glued to their handheld videogames. Just incredibly active kids. Anyway, the Australian and his Vietnamese wife loved the Texas chili. The kids would eat a bite, go back to wrestling then repeat it. The 5-year old had some adult chili. The 3-year old was crazy for watermelon.
We didn't get to open the pie that we got because the guests brought their own chocolate cake. The 8 of us ate about half of the chocolate cake, delicious by the way, and didn't even bother bringing out our pie.
Anyway, after balls, chili with beans, watermelon, and coffee and cake, the kids were a bit too rowdy, so we went to a nearby park which I didn't know existed, and they ran around for a little while. We came back to the apartment, and I somehow got invited to go see Monsters University with them next Sunday. I wasn't planning on seeing that movie, but hey, I got invited, should be fun.
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