Hot Today, Chili Tamale

Dig on this, we've got another cooking contest coming at work. In case you missed it, one of my best entries ever was related to my triumph at our Pie Baking Contest last year. I honestly cannot blame my coworkers for picking another food entirely after the savage ass whuppin' I applied last year with Momma P's Mystery Pie. But do they really think it'll be a different story this time? Whether it's chili or pies, the same mastermind is behind it. And even more than that, the same cooking strategies apply: buy all the wrong stuff, throw out the recipe, and pray no one dies.

The Chili Cook-Off is this Friday, leaving me with precious little time to learn how chili is made, and more importantly, to pick my chili name. Anything I do is marked by bravado; I'm a lot like Liberace in that way. And chili names are all about bravado. Everyone likes a delicious dish, but how much better is it when the name of that delicious dish is a pun? In fact, forget the delicious part entirely; even if the chili were full of old boots and syringes, wouldn't you still want to eat it if the name were a pun? You wouldn't just want to eat it, you'd want to bathe in it probably.

And so here's the current dilemma: I'm having a hard time coming up with this most awesome of chili names. I've come up with a few on my own, but nothing blows my pants away. The best one I have so far (The Regurgitation Will Not Be Chilified), while amusing, lacks brevity. The other option (Hot Today, Chili Tamale) is maybe my favorite all time pun, but it's more about Mexican food than it is about chili. The options are there, but there are no clear winners. Until I make up my mind, I may as well show up with a can of Hormel and a big, sloppy kiss for the real winner. That's not the way I enter cook-offs, though. I do the cooking crappily, not the naming. Until I have my name picked, we're running on red alert here at Powell Manor. If you happen to be a professional chili namer, don't be scared to help a brother out.