Two weeks from tomorrow, we’ll have a chili cookoff at work to raise money for a co-worker who is a cancer survivor.

I was trying to find just the right chili recipe, and I remembered a pressure cooker chili recipe that I’d heard about a year or two ago and wanted to try. I bought a $30 pressure cooker today at W*l-M*rt in Tullahoma (I had looked it up online and that particular model wasn’t in stock locally). I’ve wanted a pressure cooker for some time, and this seemed like a good excuse to buy an inexpensive one.

Well, it all worked out just fine. The pressure cooker works quite well, and I managed to get through the evening without any explosions. The only thing it lacks is the immediate pressure release valve that some of the fancier models now have. For this model, you either have to wait for it to cool down or else put the whole thing under running water to cool it down more quickly.

The chili recipe was fine as well — although I need to personalize it a little bit before making it two weeks from now, since the winning recipe will be published in the newspaper, and I’m in it to win it, as the saying goes.