Happy Daylight Savings Day!

Happy Daylight Savings Day! And good morning to those of you with small children.

Please know that Swiss Mountain Dogs with a precise feeding schedule share your child’s excitement for the 6:00 hour. May you be blessed with a short nap at some point today.

So how many Elsa’s did you count on Friday? I was going to attempt the Elsa-spotting drinking game but then I remembered I wasn’t in college and had to go back to work for the rest of the day. Regardless I had a count of 8.

8 Elsas. If that sounds low to you it’s because it is. My sister said Jake had 5 Elsas in his class alone. I even bought enough candy for 250 Elsas, but apparently living behind a gate and between two family-friendly streets only gets you a handful of trick-or-treaters. Either that or the cold really did bother them anyway.

I guess a low of 65 will do that to Floridians.

Disclaimer: When the home team is playing far worse than the Bears in an off-year, no one will heckle you for your last-minute Halloween costume.

But as Cubs fans say, there’s always next year. And next year when that little 4-year -old Luigi walks right past and tells us he’s already had enough candy for this year, I will chase him down, shove a king-size Snickers in his tiny plastic pumpkin and tell him there’s no such thing as too much Halloween candy. Never give up kid. Never give up.

But I digress.

It did cool down ever so slightly this week so I decided to try out a new chili recipe. I was getting a few complaints from a certain someone who will now be my certain someone from this day forward that my go-to chili recipe didn’t have any meat in it so I experimented a little for this one. Fortunately it worked.

I sort of loosely based it off of this recipe from Taste of Home but I’ve found that with chili you have a little more wiggle room on ingredients so don’t be afraid to try something new.

Pumpkin Steak Chili

• 2 center-cut high-quality sirloins, chopped
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 1 can red kidney beans, drained and rinsed
• 1 can great northern beans, drained and rinsed
• chili sauce (garlic chili sauce and cholula)
• 1 large can crushed tomatoes 
• 1 C canned pumpkin
• 2 tsp pumpkin pie spice
• 2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 tsp pepper
• 2 tsp chili powder

In a dutch oven, saute onions until transparent. Add chopped steak and cook until browned. Stir in remaining ingredients and bring to a boil. Add spices and chili sauce to taste and water to thin. Simmer for at least an hour. Add a bay leaf to bring up the flavor.

Serve with chopped avocado, crackers or smoked shreddd gruyere cheese. Add more hot sauce.

Enjoy!