Hi All,

I hope everyone is doing well and healthy these days. I love how every year the community stands together to connect with one another, support some of the enrichment programs at McKinley Elementary School, and eat some really delicious and creative chili.

This will be my fifth year participating in the community chili competition, since my children first started attending the school. Now, my daughter is in her last year at McKinley Elementary and it's been so fun being involved with SoNo Fest.

This year I went with the chili recipe I used the first time I entered the SoNo Community Chili Competition.

If we were to have had the competition in person, I was planning on making a vegetarian chili this year. However, this year plans changed. I made a large batch of my chili a few days prior to Thanksgiving to bring to my family in Las Cruces, New Mexico. We decided at the last minute to cancel this trip, so we have quite a bit of chili to slowly eat and give away to friends and neighbors;).

This chili recipe has ingredients from the areas my family are from. My father was born and raised in the Yucatan, Mexico and my mother is from Korea. I grew up eating plenty of Mexican and Korean foods that my parents and other family members cooked.

One of the main meats in the chili is cochinita pibil, which is a staple in the Yucatan. It contains slow roasted pork, marinated in achiote paste, then wrapped in banana leaves and put in the crock pot for several hours. For the sauces, I've used mole negro and a homemade ancho chile paste, which I'll explain in the video. In past recipes, I've used bulgogi too, which is Korean bbq. I've included gochujang, which is a Korean spicy red pepper paste, and some hatch chiles, in honor of my family who now resides in Las Cruces, NM. Of course, I've included some local ingredients, like coffee from Dark Horse Coffee and a local Mexican lager from AleSmith (Stouts and porters also work well here).

There are some other "secret" ingredients that I've added to build on the complexity of flavors of the chili, but those will remain a secret for now:).

I hope you can try making this at home and here's to a successful SoNo Fest this year! Thank you!