On Mar 22, 12:01?pm, "Wayne Lundberg" >
wrote:
> I hear from my Texas 'friends' that putting beans in chili is a crime
> punishable equal to stealing a horse. Why?

Because your friends like to argue and dominate other people
with their unfounded opinions on the way the world should be.
>
> I make my chili with pinto beans and either chopped/ground beef or ground
> turkey and my family goes wild when I make it. No matter how big the pot,
> it's gone in a couple of days.

It's your chile, do what you will. If it tastes good, people are going
to eat it. If it tastes bad, they won't.

If you're going to drown your meat, fish or fowl in chile sauce, put
whatever you want in there. Throw that road-killed armadillo in there.
If you can't get an armadillo, watch for
squashed possums and raccoons. ;-)

Drown the taste with chile. It's your esophagus that's at risk with
excess chile sauce.

Chile sauce is supposed to be a *vegetable-based* sauce to be applied
as lavishly or as sparingly as the individual prefers.

"Enchilada" does not refer to a rolled up tortilla in chile sauce, it
refers to *anything* in a chile sauce.

It would be as accurate to call "Chili con Carne" by the name
"Carne de Res Enchilada" or the version with beans "Carne de Res y
Frijoles Enchiladas".

The meat, fish, or fowl should be cooked as much as possible
separately, and then finished in the sauce, like the cooks down in
Oaxaca make their Mole Whatever.

Mole and chili are essentially the same dish. They are both stews.

A cook living in a village deep in Mexico would probably have multiple
cooking pots to make everything in, while chuckwagon cook on a Texas
cattle drive might have only one large pot to throw everything into,
and the beef of an uncastrated animal that was found dead along the
trail might
be very gamy, so they would drown the bad taste in excess chile sauce.
>
> So what's the deal?

Your friends like to argue and dominate other peoples' opinions
That's it in a nutshell.