Hello. My name is Paul and I am a Chilli addict.
I like my food hot. Not, super market “hot”, but properly hot. I’ve been cooking Chillies and Curries for about 6 or 7 years, give or take. And they’ve only gotten hotter.
I’ve always liked Curry but shied away from Chilli Con Carne (Note: I refer to this only as “Chilli”, it’s bound to confuse you at some point, for that I apologise in advance), I’d never had a good one. My friend (well, technically my boss) convinced me to give his a try one time, he was proud of it and new I liked spicy food, he was my boss, so I let him fetch some in for me to try. I liked it a lot.He gave me his recipe, I made it. I was hooked.
Over the next couple of months I would tweak and play with his recipe until it had grown into it’s own animal, my beast to tame. I added spices he hadn’t used, I added different variations of meat. I played around with it until I was happy to let other people taste it, I hadn’t really “cooked” before and I don’t suppose people would ever mistake me for a cook either.
I’d got a camping trip planned with two friends, I said I’d fetch my Chilli for us to try at the night time for our tea. I figured we’d be a couple of beers in and it’d help it go down well if it wasn’t as good as I thought it was.
The fact we forgot cooking utensils didn’t really bother us at this point either…
It went down well. Really well. I was very pleasantly surprised, I knew I liked it but for others, well, it was a big step up from throwing super market food in to the oven put it that way.
I was ready to take a sample into work for my boss to try, he was confident his would remain king in his head so we organised a little Cook-Off between the three of us in our team. I was first.
I’m not going to lie and say I was nervous, I wasn’t, I’d be getting it out of the way and the chips would fall where they may.
On the morning it was my turn, I rocked into work carrying my humble creation, armed with wraps and cheese. It got close to dinner time, my boss convinced that he was going to take the crown after some gentle banter between us all through the morning.
It got to just before dinner time, and literally time to put my money where my mouth was. We sloped off upstairs to the canteen to prepare the dinner I’d made us all.
It went well. Very well. The Cook Off was declared null and void at the end of the meal, nobody, not even my boss wanted to compete against it.
High praise indeed.
Other people tried, and, at the risk of sounding big headed, loved it.
Shortly after that I’d meet a girl who I’d later marry. She lived quite the distance away, I’d see her every other week when I went over to visit. It wasn’t long before I was fetching Chilli with me each time. We’d marry three years later, I guess the way to a woman’s heart is through Chilli 😉
Fast forward a couple of years and it had come to my 40th year on this planet and I wanted to start doing new things with my life. As you do.
Now, I’d be lying if I said I’d always wanted to grow plants but as I said, I’m a chilli head, and I did quite fancied the idea of growing chilli plants.
I’d bought one the previous year that for whatever reason hadn’t really grown any in the year I’d had it. I didn’t know why, I just got used to caring for a stump with a few leaves.
So, when my wife wanted to know what she could get me from the kids for my birthday I had this bright idea to get me a greenhouse from a local store.
They where on offer for quite cheap, £20, and I thought, “Why not?” – I’ll give it a go.
And thus I ended up with a Walk in Greenhouse, a bag of Compost and some Seeds to grow.
I didn’t really know what I wanted to grow so I bought things that we used, Onions are something I use a lot of in my cooking, Tomatoes as well, Chillies, well, obviously and Aubergines for my wife to use.
It’d be good to get to the point where I can grow everything I needed to make my Chilli-Con-Carne