December 6 Vallarta Yacht Club Parking Lot

The purpose of the cook off is to raise money for various charities; it is the biggest fund raiser of the club.  This year the money was earmarked for medicine and medical supplies for the families of the dump.  Hank had signed up and wanted to try out his mole sauce for the base of the chili.  He started purchasing his own meat and fine tuning his recipe by bringing it to a Sunday pot luck at the Vallarta Yacht Club. The organizer’s instructions asked for 5 gallons of chili, but he did mention that you can’t win if you run out of chili!  Two days before the event Hank started chopping and browning meat.  He borrowed a large kettle from Doug Campbell the event chairman.  The real challenge was cooking that much chili in a ship’s galley, on a small three burned propane stove and then finding a way to keep it in a refrigerator.  Hank’s chili was also going to be all meat so we couldn’t count on beans as filler.  Each night he would carefully put things into large zip lock bags and load it into the boat’s refrigerator. He ground dry chilies, nuts, chocolate, and cinnamon; he even used ground tortilla chips for his thickener.  See our recipe section for our Mole recipe that was used as the basis for the chili.  The boat had the most delicious smell for two days!

 In the meantime, Betsy tried to stay out of the galley, not wanting to see the splashes of sauce that were inevitably going to be in her galley.  She planned the decorations for the booth with the theme of Chili of the Gods. She was grateful for the solar panel boxes which we had hauled all the way from Las Vegas for she turned them into Aztec Indians.  Our booth sign was made out of ½ a bed sheet and she utilized her school teacher skills with the lettering.  Her main challenge was making aluminum necklaces for all the 6 crew members.  When the names were drawn for booth location, we were pleased to get the exact spot that we wanted.  We needed two trees to put up our sign and with the help of John and Scot the booth was quickly decorated.  There were 12 teams in the competition and we were in the cruisers division.  The cook off started at 4 and there were many people willing to try all sorts of chili.  Hank appreciated all the comments he received about the complexity of flavors in the chili and many people kept coming back and back. By about 5:20P.M.most of the booths were sold out and the only remaining chili was a vegetarian chili. How would they tell the winners of the cook off?  This would be determined by the number of tickets that you had collected for passing out your chili.  Finally the jars of tickets were collected and the count was made.  Equinox’s Chili of the Gods was to be second place in the cruisers division and Raptor Dance’s vegetarian chili was first.  OH, Well!  We were in it for the charity and not the winning, yeah, right.  We did feel rather let down, but we should have made more chili.  The event raised 47,000 pesos which was a 30% gain over last year, so we felt very happy for that.  We also want to thank Sue and Scot Rader of Suebee and John and Rosie Olsen of Eager Dreamer for all their wonderful help and support.  It gets tiring passing out that much chili, pouring it into 4oz cups and our gang was great in taking over so Hank could relax.  Finally when it was all over, for clean up for any event in Mexico is very fast, and the parking lot looked normal again, Hank and I headed out for pizza.  Yes, pizza is very big here and there is a Dominoes Pizza right here in the mall.