Lisa Vilella Makes Savory Chili by the Vat

Lisa Vilella of Wyandotte doesn’t cook very much anymore, now that her two kids are grown and she is busy with her business. But when she does cook—look out!

In particular, Vilella doesn’t mess around when she makes chili. She doesn’t make quarts. She makes gallons of the spicy dish.

“I make this huge vat of it, and my husband (Jim) takes it to work,” she said. “We send it with cheese, sour cream, green onions and some oyster crackers and it always goes.”

She makes cornbread to send with it, too.

“How can you have chili without cornbread?” she said with a laugh.

Jim works at Ford Motor Co., and Lisa’s chili and cornbread go over pretty darned well with employees.

“I used to cook a lot, but once I started the business (Lisa Vilella Insurance Agency in Woodhaven) and the kids got older …” she said.

She “wings it” when she’s making chili, and just follows her instincts and her taste buds. On a recent chilly chili day—the homonyms go together—she prepared a gigantic batch to share. Some of her family members in Wyandotte get a call, too, when the huge pot is ready, and they come over with spoons and appetites ready.

“I text them and tell them the chili’s on,” Lisa said, mixing up cornbread batter.

Ingredients simmering in the vat of chili included—in no particular order—red kidney beans, pinto beans, tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, beef broth, crushed red pepper, butter beans, chili powder, garlic powder, sautéed onions, sautéed and diced yellow squash and zucchini, tomato paste, corn, a couple of boxes of Carroll Shelby’s chili kit spice mix, chopped round steak and 5 pounds of browned ground chuck.

Yes, there is squash in that ingredient list. It simmers down and adds flavor and nutritional value to the mix, but tasters can’t really tell it’s in there. She enters her chili in the Michigan State Farm Insurance Co. chili cook-off every year, too.

Her thick chili has a little bit of a spicy punch, but not so much that one’s mouth starts on fire.

“I usually make it fairly mild,” Lisa said. “I like having a thick chili. Otherwise, it’s more like minestrone soup.”

You can always add red pepper if you want it spicier.

“Hey, if it comes out and you don’t like it, that’s why they have restaurants,” she said with a laugh.

Lisa also puts out a weekly online newsletter called Friday’s Finds through her business, and always shares recipes in the publication, as well as letting other Downriver businesses advertise in it for free.

“I started the newsletter as way to reach out to people and educate them about insurance,” she said, “but I also know that you have to keep their interest. So we started doing the recipes and also working with the Humane Society to do weekly adoption dogs.

“I was born and raised Downriver. I love the people, the closeness it brings. I see what the economy has done to the Downriver community, and truly believe if we all stick together and help each other, we all will make it through this together. So I decided to help out local businesses by advertising them for free.”

Obviously, Lisa believes in sharing. She shared her most recent vat of chili with Ford workers and is sharing her cornbread recipe with Patch readers.

CORNBREAD

1 ¼ cups yellow cornmeal

¼ cup melted butter

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

½ cup sugar

½ teaspoon salt

1 cup milk

1 egg

1 cup corn kernels

Mix dry ingredients. Add milk, beaten eggs and melted butter to dry mixture. Stir until batter is moist, but still slightly lumpy. Stir in corn kernels.

Pour batter into an 8-inch square pan.

Bake for 20 to 25 minutes in a preheated 400-degree oven, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out dry.