The back story.

From a close examination of the photo of the World Champions trophy (which, fittingly, is a large bean pot) you’ll see that my bean cooking co-champion, my life-long friend Dr. George L. Vitek and I entered the contest 3 times, inishing 5th, then 2nd, and finely winning on the 3rd try.

That’s not what’s interesting.

Here’s what’s interesting. The recipe was the same for all three years except for what seems to be a minor ingredient. It’s a complicated recipe with several ingredients and requiring a mocojete (motor and pestle) to grind herbs and spices and compound them into fresh tomatoes. One ingredient was to squeeze the juice of one Mexican lime into the pot, which we did the first two losing years.

When cooking the third year we discovered we had forgotten to buy limes. But, since we made margaritas to drink as a necessary aid to cooking, we did have a package of powdered margarita mix. Because margaritas had lime juice, we decided just to sprinkle in some powdered margarita mix rather than have to go to the trouble of going back into the town of Kingsland, where the championship was held, to buy limes. That’s called, “margarita logic,” if you’ve had more than two.

Viola: We won the Championship! with our secret ingredient, powdered margarita mix. Approaching the speakers’ platform we were whooping and hollering like you would have thought we had won a gold medal in the summer Olympics (That's called "margarita infused celebration"). Soon after all the ballyhoo had died down, we decided it was the better part of wisdom to retire as Champions, rather than risk defeat, which I think is the reason a lot of champion’s retire.
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Meanwhile, if you are interested, the recipe has been published in a small handful of recipe books, including the world famous Delhi Ladies Club Cookbook, of Delhi, Texas. Please don’t ask me where you can get a copy, it was published in 1979. I imagine someone in Delhi, Rosanky, or String Prairie has a copy. You may know someone living in one of those three small towns, but I doubt the odds are in your favor.

The End.