Recipe: Spaghetti Sauce Chili--NOT

Purging the refrigerator can yield surprising new delicacies if you don't label the leftovers.

Wednesday's weather promised to be warm (at least for this time of year) and sunny so we decided to rally the troops and take a hike. What we'd planned as a leisurely walk up a canyon turned out to be navigating across some steep, rugged terrain--we could see where we wanted to be, it just wasn't easy to get there.

The hike took longer than expected, but the weather was indeed beautiful and we returned home happy and tired, and voted to relieve the refrigerator of its leftovers for dinner. My brother-in-law handed me 2 unlabelled plastic bowls with lids and said, "Here are 2 dishes of bison chili: it should be enough for all of us."

I dumped them both in the pot to warm them on the stove. When I served up the bowls I noticed this was indeed a strange chili recipe. There were sliced mushrooms, two kinds of meat, beans, tomatoes. He had actually given me a dish of chili and a dish of leftover spaghetti sauce. The resulting Italian-sausage-bison-bean-mushroom-spaghetti-sauce-chili was, shall we say, interesting. I won't be posting the recipe soon....

You will see soup recipes getting top billing on this Seasonal Cooking site this time of year. Soup is the perfect way to use dried and canned ingredients when fresh just isn't available. So enjoy our soups -- and label your leftovers!