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pounds ground turkey (or ground pork or beef)
2 tablespoons red New Mexico chili, ground or powder (see note)
1 16-oz can stewed tomatoes
½ cup flour
    Sauté the onion and two cloves of the chopped garlic in a sauce pot, preferably cast iron, sufficiently large to hold the beans and their liquid.
    After the onions become translucent (about 10 minutes), add the beans and the potatoes (which, I’ve been told, help to reduce intestinal gas) and 4 cups of water, or enough to cover the beans.
    Bring to a rapid boil and then reduce to a simmer until beans are soft, about 2 hours.
    Meanwhile, in another stove-top pot—also ideally cast iron—sauté the remaining onion and garlic until the onion turns translucent.
    Add the ground turkey and continue to cook until it browns thoroughly.
    Mix in the chili powder to coat the meat mixture thoroughly.
    Add the tomatoes and 4 cups of water, bring to a boil, and then reduce to a simmer.
    Once the chili mixture has simmered for about 1 hour, place the flour in a small sauté pan and heat it gradually, stirring constantly, until it browns (do not overcook).
    Once the flour is a caramel-brown color, remove it from the heat and add it to the chili mixture 1 tablespoon at a time, until mixture is thickened.
    To serve, place the beans in a bowl and then cover with the chili.
    Note: New Mexico red chili powder can be found at Whole Foods in the spice area or at Web sites such as www.hatch-chile.com and www.nmchili.com. As an alternative, you can grind dried chili pods into a powder.

MANNY HOWARD
    Stunt Foodways
    Manny Howard, a James Beard Foundation Award–winning writer and a former senior editor and former contributing editor at Gourmet magazine, is the author of My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm; A Cautionary Tale, published by Scribner.
    To secure the love of a beautiful woman, I loaded a dead pig into the back of my late-model Chevy Blazer. It was August 2001. I pressed my buddy Malachi into service, purchased four fronds from a banana tree, a yard of chicken wire, and two yards of burlap. I liberated two dozen granite cobblestones from behind the flimsy fencing of a municipal landscaping project and drove the Blazer one hundred miles east, straight out to sea and the tip of Long Island. I had a promise to keep. It mattered little that I had only the vaguest notion about how to deliver on it.
    Lisa and I met one night in the dead of winter. If her affection for her “summerhouse friends” wasn’t the first topic of conversation, it was the second. It became very clear very quickly that if I didn’t win their approval, Lisa and I were going to have a problem. This was going to be trouble if I fell hard for this hard-charging beauty from Jackson, Mississippi.
    Spring came quickly; summer, too. A reckoning was upon us both. No stranger to the grand gesture, early one Wednesday morning, over coffee, I announced that the coming weekend I would prepare a special feast for her summerhouse friends. I would roast a whole pig.
    The declaration had the desired effect. I received an e-mail from Lisa shortly before lunchtime notifying me that the entire house had been made aware of my plan and everyone was excited by the prospect of a roast pig for dinner on Saturday night. As an aside, Lisa inquired where I intended to roast this pig.
    On the beach, of course, was my confident reply.
    “Have you ever roasted a whole pig anywhere before?” asked Malachi after I described the caper, a fever dream revealing itself to me as I spoke.
    “How hard can it be?” I replied, incredulous.
    Malachi said that he thought roasting a whole pig might be quite difficult, never mind enormously time consuming. “How about burgers?”
    I explained that the whole point was to put the residents of the summerhouse on their heels. Get them watching the food. Take the focus off me. Everybody loves burgers, but this was too big a job for burgers. Lisa had told me that her friends