Miles Davis's Chili

Image by Frankenstein via Flickr

A mysterious recipe sets the writer off on a quest to learn about his musical hero, by eating his food.

I've never wanted to be someone else, except for maybe Miles Davis. And so I needed to eat his chili. ...

I started wondering: When would Miles make it? What flickered through his head when he cooked it? Smelled it? Tasted it? Because it hit me then that this man who ignored his past, who made such a wreck of his relationships, who bore so many of his refusals with something close to pride--here was one of his very few nostalgic gestures, the so-seldom look back, conjuring up the tastes of his hometown. ...

And so this recipe, with no instructions, and only a few actual quantities, I realized, was also written to be improvised. What would Miles Davis do? Whatever the hell he wanted.

This reminds me that at some point I should sit down and make a "canonical" written-down recipe for my chili. I mean, my recipe-in-pictures is pretty cool, but still...