My mom’s recipe box is a pretty one with colorful flowers stamped on its metal exterior. Inside is what you’d expect of a mother of six: well-worn and stained recipe cards with recipes she carefully typed on her manual typewriter with handwritten notes in the margins. 

I cooked from them as a child, but it wasn’t until I was in my late 40s that I noticed a critically important omission from her chili recipe. Where she typed in “chili powder,” she had crossed it out and wrote, “omit”. 

I gut-laughed a bit too much…chili without chili powder!

My smug laughter soon subsided when I realized that MY chili does NOT have chili powder as a listed ingredient. What it does have however, is a list of spices that when put together, make chili powder.

MY CHILI

Death's Door Chili. It’s what I make when the howling Door County winds are blowing across the icy waters and chilling everything to its core. The house is cozy with flickering flames in the fireplace, the soft snores of slumbering Frenchies as they snuggle in for the evening, and the warming scents of the simmering chili that reach every nook and cranny.

This chili is not my mom’s "add three cups of water, one cup of tomato juice, and omit the chili powder" concoction. This is a stick to your bones and keeps you warm throughout the night when it’s minus 1000º outside and the world might freeze over, kind of chili.

THE NAME

I confess. It’s spicy, but not the kind of chili that is so spicy it will send you to your grave. I named it Death’s Door because of the perilous passage between the tip of the Door Peninsula and Washington Island to the north. I could not pass up the name, and for the right dinner guests, I might bump up the heat to Death’s Door status. 

To read more about Death’s Door, visit:

www.doorcounty.com

*My chili recipe is based on “Slow Cooker Chili” by Sarah DiGregorio.