Today was the annual Winter Regatta, which is another way people here say "Chili Contest". Mom spent the night bent over the stove trying to channel Grandpa's recipe into an open pot. Meat, beans, spices, and Grandpa's secret ingredient which is...wait, I want to stay married so if you want to find out you'll have to go to Grandpa's own website, whatsablog?.com.
At breakfast we brainstormed for names appropriate for a chili contest entry and rejected such fierce monikers as Solar Flare (Dad), Flame Thrower (Lev), Sunlight (I think Molloy only grasped half the concept) for a name more suitable to compete with entries such as Fire in the Hole and Thunderbottom. In the end, we settled on the more benign Grandpa's Chili.
We took the kids down to the stark, harsh wasteland of the winter seashore and once again justified our membership fees in a sailing club simply by eating chili.
With 10 entries our chances looked pretty good. Lev made sure he tried them all in great quantities and I thought it best to wait until morning to explain the name Thunderbottom to him: It should be a pretty easy explanation if I time it right. Daniel bounced back and forth between chili and fruit (who brought the fruit, oh wait, I get it...it must have been musical fruit). Molloy fluttered about convinced they all tasted the same.
The kids also got their very first civics lesson as we carefully explained to them how important it was they evaluate each candidate fairly before voting for Mom.
Finally, all the votes were cast and tallied and the winner was announced (how do you identify the winner of a chili contest- The Chilliest?) And the winner was....somebody else. A thirteen-year-old girl won for the second year in a row and her name will be forever etched on the wall plaque as the winner of the 2011 Winter Regatta.
But wait! After talking with her for a few minutes she confessed that although she cooked it, it was her grandfather's recipe. But there's more! The name of her chili; Stinky Pete's, the name of our kids very own grandfather (well, not the "stinky" part).
I smell a scandal worthy of the Commodore's attention.
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