Swing and a Miss

[husband] very rarely has a miss in the kitchen. In the 5 years I've been eating his cooking and baking, I can only think of one thing: he makes an amazing warm, German-style potato salad that is dressed with red wine vinegar and a smidge of oil. He doesn't like vinegar though so he's never really tasted it and he's less familiar with the properties of various vinegars. We were out of RWV when he made it once, and subbed in balsamic. It was pretty ugly. [Husband] made some crock pot chili the other day, and I wouldn't say it was a total miss, but, it's just a fact: pork does not go in chili. It just doesn't work. We had a whole pork tenderloin (like the big guy that is requires to hands to lift out of the meat case), which was cut up into a delicious pork roast and then the rest was braised in the crock pot to make chili. It doesn't matter how you season it, or what you put in it. Chili plus pork ends up tasting like some kind of over-sugared bbq stew. I love bbq, but this is not appetizing. We have a chili cook-off each year (used to be at my old house, now it's hosted by one of the former roommates, elsewhere) and one of the original chili cook-off contestants is OBSESSED with getting as much meat as possible in his chili. I think his 2008 entry had 4 pounds of meat in it, two of which were bacon. Sorry, that's not chili, it's bbq stew. (Didn't help that it had a whole bottle of actual bbq sauce in it. Sweet bbq sauce). Now, I'll take a nice pork and black bean stew with some Cuban flavors in it. YUM. And you can even call it chili if you want. But chili seasoning plus pork. No.