Rachel's All-American Meat Lovers Chili

From the time of my birth until the time I was about 27 years old, there was nothing anyone could do to make me eat beans; not the green ones, I like those; but the pinto, black and kidney variety.  Put beans on the dinner table and you get an immediate sneer of disgust.  I had maybe choked down 10 beans my whole life.  Then I met my husband and he really liked this weird thing that his mom used to make called chili soup.  And because I love my husband I decided to try it out...it called for bean with bacon campbell's soup and a can of chili (and other stuff).  I got the no bean chili but it was pretty difficult to get no bean bean with bacon soup.  The long story short is that I came to love beans.  Ridiculous!  Why had I been wasting my whole life sneering at beans?  What was I thinking?  So began a blissful few years with the joy of beans in my life.  I made all sorts of dishes that included beans.  I tried refried beans and even enjoyed them.  I made all sorts of chili and tried chili at all the restaurants I went to; it was heaven.

Then, about 6 months ago my doctor told me to stop eating beans for now and I said okay.  What a sad day.  No more chili, no more Mexican type dishes; it was in very deed a tragedy.  But, finally, I found a recipe for no bean chili that I wanted to try but I just didn't have the motivation to do it because it called for so much meat!  It would cost a fortune!  Finally, though, I had an excuse to try it out: a chili cookoff that I was going to take part in.  If I wanted to eat anything at the cookoff then I would just have to make the meat-lovers chili since I couldn't count on someone else making no bean chili.

So I got my 3 1/2 pounds of meat, the other ingredients and got to work.  Since I was going to be transporting this dish I made it in the crockpot but the recipe says you can just cook it on the stove top if you want.   Basically you just throw all the meat and veggies in together and cook the meat. 

Then you add in the spices and tomato cans.  It sure filled up my pot!  At this point, you can just finish cooking it on the stove and eat it, but, as aforementioned, I threw it in my crock pot for six hours on low.  

Since it was a new recipe I had to try some of it before I went to the chili cookoff with it.  How embarrassing it would be if it were terrible.  Luckily, it was delicious.  Apparently, though, it was not that delicious since I got third place out of three chili dishes.  Oh well.  In fairness, I didn't even vote for my own chili because someone did actually make a no bean chili I could eat and it was delicious and totally deserved to be number 1.