Our friend Rita is one of the sweetest people you could ever meet! She lives in Missouri now, but was raised in Texas and Oklahoma. She has this recipe for chili that is outstanding! We make her chili on a regular basis in our house, is so good! So I took her recipe and gave it a few personal touches and here is it, Rita’s Chili 2.0.

The original recipe called for just ground beef. I like ground beef, but I have found that mixing ground beef with ground pork, makes a magical thing! It is a match made in heaven. The Angels sing when you cook beef and pork together. Ok, so that is a little too much, but you get my point, both meats mix really well. I have also mixed the beef with turkey to make it a little bit healthier and it works well. I keep the higher amount of meat being the beef. I find turkey a little bland, but that is just me. Chili is one of those soups that pretty much any kind of ground beef will work. I had venison chili once and it was really good. A friend sometime ago made a chili with rattle snake meat! And you know what? It wasn’t bad at all.

This recipe is super easy to make. It is all in one pot, and once you brown the meat with the onions, garlic and peppers, all what is left is dropping the rest of the ingredients and let it simmer. That easy! You could make it on your crockpot and let it cook slowly all day. But you don’t really have to. It doesn’t take that long for it to cook for a delicious bowl of chili!

I made usually this a little bit spicier. I do like some heat in my chili. But the husband doesn’t like food too spicy. So I cut the amount of red pepper flakes to 1 teaspon. That is going to give you a nicely flavored chili with a hint of heat. But just a hint. If you prefer more heat. use up to 1 tablespooon of the red pepper flakes. It will be a nice heat without becoming too much of a challenge. Of course. you can add more if you are use to that much heat.