Cornbread and Chili (?)

That's my dad. He stands like a military man because he is a military man. He was a Naval Captain for the Imperial Iranian Navy back in the good old days when the country was run by humans and not a monkey in an ill-fitting suit (no offense to all the monkeys out there). Anyways. My temper, skinny ankles, and appetite all came from him. So did my love for spicy food. If it makes my eyes water and mouth burn, even better. Since Persian food isn't exactly known for its kick, a spicy dinner wasn't going to sprout from the motherland. 

Enter: Chili. I read a few recipes and came to the conclusion that chili is one of those meals that resulted from leftovers. I had just bought hot sausage and I originally wanted to use that as the meat for my chili, but my dad has high cholesterol and I wanted him to be able to enjoy it so I used ground turkey. Sorry, sausage. I had to make one fatty thing though, and since I'm the only cornbread fan in the house I used that as my opportunity. Standard cornbread with melted jalapeno butter. 

Ok, so it's not really jalapeno butter (does that even exist?), but rather, butter melting with bacon grease and jalapenos. The goal was for all the pepper oils and juices to become incorporated into the butter so that I could strain it into the cornbread batter but keep the jalapeno flavor. Unfortunately, it wasn't as strong as I was hoping for so I just chopped up the peppers and threw them in too. 

Not too shabby. 

Chili time. As I mentioned before, I used ground turkey instead of the hot sausage (*sniffles*), chopped onions, chopped tomatoes, garlic, red kidney beans, and pinto beans. I seasoned it with salt, pepper, cumin, chili powder,  cayenne pepper, more sliced jalapenos and another little green pepper that I don't know what it was, hot sauce, and a little something I picked up that I like to call, awesome:

How cool is that? Seriously? I really hope people aren't thinking "eewwwww, woman you're gross", because I seriously thought this was incredible. Cooked the beans, cooked the meat with the onion and garlic, mixed it all together, let it simmer, and kept adding more of the peppers and seasonings until my tongue went "holy smokes, that's bananas".

Didn't look at all what I thought it was going to look like (kind of funny looking if you ask me, but YUM), that's why I used the question mark, I don't know what qualifies as chili and what just spicy generic food.