Some dishes are worth keeping

I was afraid that, a dozen days later, my "this ought to work" veggie chili would be an undifferentiated mass of goo, but not so: it actually keeps nearly as well as serious beef chili.

This dish was actually the result of the Sharepoint conference I went to (SPTechCon), a week ago Monday. The conference was, frankly, pretty disappointing: while I learned a bit, I got about half an hour's worth of education out of each of the three-hour workshops I took there. One of the sessions was too disorganized; the other was well-enough done, but less relevant than I'd been hoping for. If I'd paid my own money, I would have been downright annoyed -- as it was, I was mostly cranky about losing an entire day of work without enough to show for it.

But *lunch* was surprisingly good. The conference was held at The Ziggurat -- the Marriott on Mem Drive where Arisia resides nowadays. They had opened up an innocuous door next to the escalator, which led into a corridor I'd never seen before, leading to an airy pavilion they'd set up outside -- one of those big affairs with big plastic domed "windows", looking rather like a Victorian glass house. I and my co-worker Bob sat and ate a rather good lunch with a bunch of other engineers, commiserating about how much Sharepoint sucks for serious work. And the centerpiece of the meal was a quite good vegetarian chili, which left me with a bad case of, "That was tasty *and* healthy. Surely I can do that." So a day or two later, I did.

Of course, like so many of my dishes, this was more thrown together than designed. But for my reference and your consideration, the basics(  behind the cut )

Some dishes are worth keeping

I was afraid that, a dozen days later, my "this ought to work" veggie chili would be an undifferentiated mass of goo, but not so: it actually keeps nearly as well as serious beef chili.

This dish was actually the result of the Sharepoint conference I went to (SPTechCon), a week ago Monday. The conference was, frankly, pretty disappointing: while I learned a bit, I got about half an hour's worth of education out of each of the three-hour workshops I took there. One of the sessions was too disorganized; the other was well-enough done, but less relevant than I'd been hoping for. If I'd paid my own money, I would have been downright annoyed -- as it was, I was mostly cranky about losing an entire day of work without enough to show for it.

But *lunch* was surprisingly good. The conference was held at The Ziggurat -- the Marriott on Mem Drive where Arisia resides nowadays. They had opened up an innocuous door next to the escalator, which led into a corridor I'd never seen before, leading to an airy pavilion they'd set up outside -- one of those big affairs with big plastic domed "windows", looking rather like a Victorian glass house. I and my co-worker Bob sat and ate a rather good lunch with a bunch of other engineers, commiserating about how much Sharepoint sucks for serious work. And the centerpiece of the meal was a quite good vegetarian chili, which left me with a bad case of, "That was tasty *and* healthy. Surely I can do that." So a day or two later, I did.

Of course, like so many of my dishes, this was more thrown together than designed. But for my reference and your consideration, the basics(  behind the cut )