Like many young adults, I didn’t do much cooking until I moved out of my parents’ house.
I shared my first apartment out of college with a friend from work. It was a great setup, and I loved the time I lived with her. But I didn’t have a lot of money.
I quit the job that gave me the money I needed to move in the first place. So I was left strapped for cash, mostly living off a small savings and a minimum-wage job.
With barely enough money for a box of $1 pasta and a bag of frozen vegetables, there wasn’t a lot of experimenting going on. I do remember frying squash on that stove at least once, looking out the window and onto our balcony while waiting.
After my roommate married, we both moved out. The Dark Scary Apartment was where I more properly learned to cook.
New Kitchen, New Recipe
But today’s lesson isn’t from the Dark Scary Apartment. As you might guess by the name, I didn’t stay in that place long. After a year, I moved again. This time, to a neighborhood in a house that looked like a single-family home but was actually a duplex.
It was a bit farther from my job than the other places I’d lived. And while my work hours of 10-6:30 suited my life very well, I didn’t have much desire to cook when I got home. Naturally, I ventured into the world of crockpot meals.
Chili was one of the first meals I made in the crockpot. As it turns out, the recipe from this story is the same one I’m still using.
I’m hazy on the details of my first attempt at this meal. Was I doing this before work? On the stove after work? Maybe it was a weekend or a day I got off early?
What I do remember with absolute clarity is standing at my kitchen counter, to the left of the sink, looking out the window into the back yard. There wasn’t much back there – a shed, some trees, and a sliver of the road that wound around the side of the house. This particular time, I spent a lot of time standing at that counter, staring out the window, questioning all my decisions up to that point.
This was my first time cooking with real garlic. Up until now, I either substituted with garlic powder, some handy jar-lic, or left it out entirely. I was not made of money.
My recipe called for 2 cloves of garlic, so at the store a few days before, I bought 2 garlics (can you see where this is going yet?)
You Can’t Have Too Much Garlic (Can You?)
I was very far into this mistake before realizing I had indeed made one. I have no idea how long I stood at the counter peeling and chopping. Looking back, I can still hear myself mumbling into the void, wondering who in the world would put this much effort into this.
Everything was sticky, and it was taking forever to get the papery skin off. Then chopping an already small piece of garlic into smaller pieces was… maddening.
Somewhere into the second “garlic,” I began to wonder who on Earth uses this much garlic in a recipe. And why is it taking so long? I’d been working for 30 minutes already on just garlic. I could see the pile in my pot. And while admittedly it’s my first time, even I know this feels wrong.
As you might guess, it was wrong. And it was a lot of garlic. Instead of 2 cloves, I was closer to 2 bulbs.
To make matters worse, instead of keeping it in a separate bowl or on the cutting board, I’d been adding it right into the pot. No going back now.
I’ll be honest, while I don’t remember with certainty what I did with that pot of chili, I suspect I cooked it and ate it. I didn’t have the money to just throw things out if I messed up. Most likely, I tried to soften the blow by putting the chili over rice and eating just a little at a time.
I don’t remember thinking the chili had too much (of anything) in it.
A Reminder and a Recipe
So here is your reminder: make mistakes. Eat them anyway. You can’t have too much garlic. And maybe know the difference between a clove and a bulb of garlic before you go shopping. (But you don’t know what you don’t know, right?)
I would love to credit the original writer of this recipe. But my Google Drive says I’ve had it since 2014, so I have no idea who wrote it. Hopefully, they won’t mind me passing it along.
