One of my favorite times of the year is the fall. The air starts to cool off, the leaves start changing colors, and college football is in full swing. This also means my chili season is in full swing. Of course we can make chili anytime of the year, but there is nothing like chili in the fall. So today, in honor of us not having cool breezes and changing leaves when we make chili next year, and this years chili season coming to a close, I figured I would show how I make my chili.

I like to call it, well chili I guess.

(**Disclaimer… I’m not a professional chef. I don’t care what you think about my ingredients or the way I cook them. If you don’t like it, well then you don’t get a bowl… Please get out of my living room… You can watch the game in the basement.)

The ingredients.

2lb lean ground beef  -  2 yellow onions  -  2 green peppers  -  1 red pepper  -  2 jalapeno peppers (not shown but there in there)  -  3 cans diced tomatoes (I use zesty chili style and basil, oregano, and onion style)  -  3 cans kidney beans (1 white, 1 light red, 1 dark red because its essential to have LOTS of color)  -  1 6oz can of Tomato Paste  -  1 hot chili seasoning packet  -  1 box of original Saltines crackers

The guy that makes the magic happen.

Oh Mr. Crock, I Love You..  You are magical.

Alright, the play-by-play.  Stay with me here.

Onions First.  Dice those babies up and get them in that pan!  Salt, Pepper, a touch of olive oil, and your good.

Once the onions are ALMOST soft, take them out and dump them into the crock pot.  Then brown the meat in that same pan.  Season with some salt, pepper, Lawry’s, and some garlic.

Once the meat is good and brown, into the Crock-pot it goes.

Now things get really exciting.  Dice up those peppers baby!

Now don’t get too crazy here, this is very important so listen up.  Only put 1 red, and 1 green pepper in right now.  I will tell you why later.

Next get those diced tomatoes in there.

After that, Beans, Beans, and more Beans.  But not The Bean he won’t fit, and you can’t buy him, and that would be weird.

Also, drain these suckers.  I don’t know why, but I don’t like the bean juice.  It’s slimy and you don’t need it.

Next plop that tomato paste right on top, followed by the chili seasoning.

Next, its the jalapenos.  Now this is the only thing I am a little flexible on.  I almost always add one because it gives a nice heat, but the second one can absolutely be throw into the mix for big game days.

Now, mix all of that goodness up and let that Crock-pot do its thang.

I usually try to get at least 4 hours in the pot.  Sometimes more, sometime less.  Remember that now lonely green pepper?  You need to add that diced pepper when you have around an 1.5 left.  The other peppers are good and soggy by then and I like my peppers to still have a little crunch when its all said and done.  So adding these late in the game is essential.

Mmmm…  Now I’m hungry.  Kate and I can kill an entire Crock-pot full of chili, so its hard to say how many people this will feed.  So you can either have some amazing left overs if there are 2-4 people eating.  Or feed 8 or so at a game day party.  You might even need to do a second pot, because people are going to want seconds.  Eat up!

As you all know, we here at MC are picking up and heading south. Its crazy how all of this happened and I’m still not sure how it seemed to all work out. It wasn’t easy getting this far, and its not over yet so we will keep you posted of course. But making this decision was really hard for me in particular. It took me a LONG time to get comfortable with the idea of going back to Florida, mainly because I love it here and I love our life here.

I don’t know if you know this about me, but I’m an independent person, I always have been. I talk to my family once a week or so, sometimes more and sometimes less, but we are all ok with that schedule. Its been like that ever since I went to college. So it didn’t bother me when we made the decision to move to Connecticut to live. Sometimes I hate that I can’t see my sister for lunch and things like that but I have learned to live with it. I know that they will always be there for me if I need them. Maybe that is a little selfish on my part, but I love that me and Kate have our own lives up here. And it makes it so much more fun when family does come to visit because we could show them places that they had never seen before!

I won’t lie. I have fallen in love with New England. As a kid I was always jealous that we didn’t have snow. It flurried like twice when we were growing up and I can remember being so excited I couldn’t even sleep. CT is a beautiful place to live. There is so much history and culture and not to mention the scenic drives are endless. I love love love love love seeing the seasons pass. I’m of the out-doorsy type and I used to think the Utah was the most beautiful place I had ever seen but I think CT takes the cake. Each season has a completely different mood and feeling and I’m going to miss that so much. In Orlando, everyday looks the same. Sunny, usually warm, it will shower around 3pm, and the trees never loose their leaves. Poor trees.

But possibly the biggest hesitation I have for packing up and moving out are all of my brothers in NYC. I can’t tell you what it means to have people around that you have known for 15+ years. Justin, my best friend since the sixth grade, grew up down the street from me when we were kids. We have been friends for so long that I can remember having sleep-over’s and talking about kissing a girl for the first time. And I can remember the first time we tried a beer. And building tree-forts. Hell I new him YEARS before I met Kate (side note, I think they actually had a thing before we got together. weird.) Now I see him playing with my son and it blows my mind.

My other boys, that justin and I met in high school, all live in the city as well and let me tell you having that support group a train ride away has been awesome. I love all of those guys and I’m going to miss them more than anything.

Now I had a feeling that we wouldn’t be around all of these wonderful things forever. I figured when we had kids that we would end up in the Carolina area which both of us had the desire to live at some point. I certainly never thought we would go all the way back to Florida, and I really didn’t think we would be heading there like tomorrow.

But the reason I can to terms with all of this is this little guy.

You see, on the flip side of all of this, I have this Bean that need to think about now. I keep going back to the fact that I don’t know where I would be if my grandparents didn’t live next door to me growing up. I was my granddad’s little shadow as soon as i could walk and I know that I want BeanMan to have a relationship like that with his grandparents. We can’t do that from Connecticut, it just doesn’t work. But I guess that’s what you do when you have kids. You still make your life decisions, you just make those decisions with someone else in mind.

I love our life here. The past five or years has been some of the best years of my life. Our marriage is stronger than ever and we have a little family of our own now, so I feel like this chapter is complete. We are at a fork and we have chosen the path to Florida. The important thing is that we made the decision together. Kate started the conversation, and we talked, and we argued, and we talked, and we made the decision that we felt was the best one for everyone evolved; Me, Kate, Bean, the Dogs, and our families. My friends will always be my brothers, and Connecticut will always have its scenic drives, but Bean Man will only grow up once. And I really want him to grow up with his family close by.

I don’t think I have ever talked about what I do for my job and since I have a pretty unique one, I thought I’d share.  The company I work for builds scenery and automation for Broadway.  I won’t lie – I love what I do and its always fun to talk about because its not a common job.

I have been working in theater for almost 15 years.  I started in high school.  Truthfully I was dragged into it, but soon after I started I was hooked.  In high school I designed and built the sets, acted in all of the plays, took tap dancing lessons for four years (still have those tap shoes buried in my closet I think).  I did it all.  The last show I did in high school was Singing in the Rain. I played Don Lockwood (no I don’t have a video, and even if I did you can’t see it) and figured out how to make it rain on our stage.  It was pretty cool.

When high school had come and gone, I found myself going to UCF with a scholarship for technical theater.  From the get-go I knew I was done with the acting/dancing/singing thing, because I wasn’t good at it.  But I was really good at building sets.  In college I worked in the scene shop any chance I had.  I worked on all the shows and really excelled.  I was the first student that the faculty trusted enough to give me my own show to plan, build, and manage.  It was a big moment for me, and I give all the credit to the great professors and mentors I had at that school.

Guys and Dolls - UCF

In college I also worked at the award winning Utah Shakespearean Festival one year as a carpenter and then I went back as an assistant technical director.  A Technical Director’s job is to take the drawings that a designer creates, engineer how they are built, and then manage the carpenters building the scenery and getting it on stage, or “load-in”.

HMS Pinafore - Utah Shakes

As undergrad was coming to an end, I was just excepting the fact that I would get a job in a theater somewhere and that would be that.   However for one of the last shows while I was there, I ended up building this little tool to help bend steel one day in the shop for a show.  One of my professors said I should write an article about it and send it in to some technical theater publications.

“An Affordable Steel Roller Bender” Published by The Yale Technical Briefs October 2006.

That was my claim to fame at the time.  It was awesome!  Not only did I get something published by Yale (which was like The Emerald City at the time to me, it was a place you only heard about, but it wasn’t real) but after the process of publishing the article, the editor of the Yale publication asked me to apply to grad school at the Yale School of Drama.

Suddenly I went from doing theater in high school to getting the absolute best education possible in technical theater.  There are theater graduate schools everywhere and there are a lot of really great programs out there, but none of them offer what Yale can offer.  Most of the good grad schools were started by and are run by graduates of Yale.  There is no comparison to anything else.  I wouldn’t trade for anything for the three years I spent at Yale.  It was a remarkable experience.  I did everything from structural & mechanical engineering, to designing hydraulic and pneumatic systems for stage machinery.  It was a massive amount of work, but I learned so much and loved every minute of it looking back.

Attempts on Her Life - Yale

Eurydice - Yale

Eurydice - Yale

At Yale I started to shift my focus a little into becoming more of a production manager/project manager.  A project manager is different than a technical director because they deal more with the business side of a production – budgets, calendars, overall production needs, overseeing the technical aspects of an entire theatrical season instead of one show.  I was the Technical Supervisor for the New York Summer Play Festival for a year while I was at Yale and that kicked off my NYC work.  It was great because I was basically in charge of anything and everything technical for a festival of 16 different shows in 4 weeks.  That was a lot of work!  But I went to work on 42nd street everyday, which was pretty freaking cool.

15 years after starting, I feel like I’m pretty much at the top.  I work for one of the top scene shops for Broadway.  We build all of the big shows: Mary Poppins, Lion King, Billy Elliot, Phantom, etc.  Last year I managed the Times Square Ball being built.  The FREAKING TIMES SQUARE BALL!  Thats crazy!  I can’t believe how far I have come, from building scenery in a parking lot in high school to undergrad to Utah to Yale to Broadway.

So now what?  I have no idea.  I’m really starting to miss something and I haven’t quite put my finger on it yet.  I used to be really excited to go to work.  I used to put so much extra effort into everything that I did because I knew people were watching and they were going to tell me how I did after I was finished.  I loved that feedback – good or bad.  I am finding that at this senior level of theater management, there is very little collaboration and I miss that part of working in theater.  Maybe its a funk, maybe I need a new job, maybe its because I have the Bean now, maybe its something else entirely.  We will just have to wait and see what happens.  Until then, the next time you go to the theater to see a show or if your in Times Square staring up a that big flashy ball, think of me.

-Chris