This is the first of perhaps many posts about the last 26 hours I spent with my dog Hooper, which also turned out to be the last 26 hours Hooper had on this earth. It’s the only way I know how to deal with this numbness, this dull ache, this incalculable sense of loss I’m experiencing. - RPG

Him: May I help you?

Me: Yeah, I’m trying to decide if I should get the Small or the Tiny.

Him: Well, the Small is our most popular size, it’s one scoop…

Me: Yeah, it’s for my dog…

Him: Oh, yeah, well we usually recommend the Tiny for the dogs.

Me: I know, that’s what I usually get for him. But like, this is his last ice cream.

Him (sotto voce): Oh. Yeah, let’s do that Single, huh?

Me (choking back tears): Yeah, Single, thanks.

Him (to the cashier): This one’s a comp.

Cashier: Comp? Ok, a hundred percent?

Him: Hundred percent.

Ice Cream Boner

There have been better years. But you know what, to have had a year at all means I was alive, and this is the greatest gift one can receive. The future is uncertain, but I guess it always is/was. Things will work out.

Chronological High/Lowlights

• I marked three years sober

• I got my first-ever bar muscle up

• I completed the 2016 CrossFit Open doing all the workouts as prescribed, finishing well above the middle of the pack, worldwide, for my age

• I had a paper published at Simbuild, documenting perhaps the last bit of Radiance-related development I ever do at NREL (high and low all in one bullet point = efficiency)

• Brenda & I separated, and I can’t possibly describe or share what that all means

• I rode my motorcycle solo on part of the Colorado Backcountry Discovery Route

• I got my first-ever pistol(s)

• I ate more Jujyfruits than I ever have in my life

• I wrote the least amount of posts on this blog since its inception in the friggin’ 90’s, yo!

2017

I believe that looking back is pointless without a look forward as well, so:

What is clear to me is that I am still a work in progress, and I have a lot of work to do.

Brenda & I will sort out who we are, what we were, and where we go next.

This year I don’t expect to do much lighting-related work at all, which marks a departure from what has become my life’s work and my career. I’m not sure I like that very much, but it does mean I have an opportunity to learn some new things, working with and learning from people I love. That’s not a bad trade, and I’ll just have to see where it leads.

I’m going monk on my day-to-day routine. Regular gym attendance at 5:30 a.m., better diet (including fasting), solid day’s work, evening study, more writing, and as many meetings as fit in with all of that. Lights out at 9. (okay, 9-ish).

I think I wanna try some more camping, definitely ride the moto in the San Juans, and probably see Wyoming.

Now I’m gonna go clean the house, ‘cause it’s a fuckin’ mess.

Right?

Lucky for me, George Furko of Northern Colorado Adventure Riders (Facebook group) had recently put together an introductory adventure ride for people just like me, just two weeks prior. I had loaded my unused sleeping bag and single-use tent onto the Tiger and we rode around the Nederland area, ultimately camping for the night near Gold Hill. After that trip I had a list of things I needed (e.g. stove, a dry bag, a few more tools) and assembled those items over the week, and changed the oil and cleaned/re-lubed the air filter.

I had also asked on NoCAR about riding in the Gunnison area, looking for good day rides for a newbie like myself with an adventure bike. I got a TON of ideas, some as complete as turn-by-turn directions on where to go. The people on that group, as well as the ADVRIDER forums, are tremendous resources!

And so the plan was to make a beeline for Gunnison the day of the wedding, and crash a hotel so I could shower and change for the do. The following days would be a string of rides based on the suggestions I’d received from everyone, with some other possible routes of my own, mostly derived from the Steve Farson book, and from my poking around in the Rockies forum of ADVRIDER.

And so last Thursday, I was out of excuses and nervously packed up my shit for the trip:

Friday dawned with beautiful weather, and I loaded up the bike, and headed out:

The ride took me down 93 outta Boulder, onto 285, over Kenosha Pass which reveals the beautiful basin of South Park, and always takes my breath away:

On to Buena Vista, onto U.S. Route 50 to Salida, and from there it was all new scenery to me. The next big milestone was the ride over Monarch Pass, and then Gunnison was up next. About five hours – four and a half hours of riding – later, I was in my motel room. Later that day, Rois & Travis got married, and mine was the only moto in the parking lot. =)

Next day’s plan was to do Ohio Pass to Kebler Pass, and make a big counter-clockwise loop around the Gunnison Forest; I’d go thru Paonia, down 92 to meet the Black Canyon and ride its north rim, and then scoot back on 50 and 135 up to Crested Butte. Ohio Pass turned out to be still closed, so I ended up taking 135 to CB and having a quick look around before catching Kebler Pass from there.

Kebler Pass takes you through a dense aspen forest and is simply amazing, and all I can think about (and all I’ve been told) is how amazing this road will look in the fall when the colors start poppin’…

The Black Canyon was cool, but didn’t quite do it for me like the Colorado National Monument does. I made a mental note to be sure and visit that one again, only on the bike. I would also like to see the Black Canyon from the south; apparently you can ride all the way down to the river on a steep-ass road, and camp down there. But for this day, I simply got back on 50 in Sapinero and headed back into Crested Butte, where I stopped for the day. I got off the bike and walked 50 feet into a medal ceremony for a mountain bike race, surrounded by pro and amateur mountain bikers, and their dogs. A 24-hour cruiser bike race was also going on. Are you getting a sense of what CB is all about? That place is fucking awesome. I had coffee at Camp 4 like I was told, dinner with friends who happened to be in town, and crashed at my other friends’ AirBnB, who were in for the wedding. It was just one happy coincidence after another.

The next day was my “Queen Stage”, as I planned to hit Cumberland Pass as well as camp that evening. The plan was to ride north out of Crested Butte on a short loop along what’s called Paradise Basin, over Schofield Pass and back into CB, and then on to Gunnison, east on 50 to Parlin, then to Pitkin where I’d start the “real” ride up Cumberland Pass Road. As it happened, I missed the turn to go over Schofield and ended up at a dead-end campsite (which was gorgeous):

When I’d turned around, I saw the trail I’d needed to stay on, and from where I was sittin’, it looked pretty fucking steep and narrow. So I headed back the way I came, and on to Parlin. At Parlin, I headed north on 76 past the Ohio City townsite, to Pitkin.

Cumberland Pass

In Pitkin, I stopped in the general store I’d seen pictures of, and chatted with a couple of guys who’d just came in from doing Cumberland on dirt bikes. They said it was “rough” on the other side, but that I “shouldn’t have any problems”. Oh good.

Cumberland Pass road is on the Colorado Backcountry Discovery Route (COBDR), a ride I’ve been obsessing about ever since I learned about it a little over a year ago. It’s a route that runs from Four Corners Monument in the southwest corner of the state, all the way to the Wyoming border, and it’s about 90% off-pavement, going over some of the classic mountain passes in the state. Many of these passes take you up above treeline, affording incredible views of the Colorado mountains. I’ve loved hiking these high mountains ever since I got to Colorado eleven years ago, and the idea of exploring them from a motorcycle has been a bit of an obsession since getting the Tiger.I thought Cumberland Pass would be a nice intro to that kind of riding, a little sampler of the ride I hope to do later this year. I was graced with clear and dry trail the whole way, and made it up there easily and without incident. I snapped a few obligatory photos of the Tiger in front of the sign at the top:

…before heading down the other side to Tin Cup, and on to Taylor Reservoir for lunch. I even remembered to record this leg with the GPS:

After lunch I went over Cottonwood Pass, which is pretty sedate by adventure rider standards but no less beautiful. Coming down the east side, I started looking for a spot to camp. I settled for a fee site, because I just wasn’t sure about just pulling off into the woods and setting up camp – even though it’s all forest land there and you pretty much can do exactly that.

I made camp, sawed some wood for a fire, and produced way more smoke than fire, but that’s OK since I was mainly interested in keeping the bugs away with that. It was time for a little dinner out of a bag, a stroll around the area, a little bike maintenance (lubed the chain), and a chance to try out the water filter (it actually worked great), and it was time to crash for the night.

Next day I broke camp, rode down the mountain and into Buena Vista for coffee and gas, then back home – but this time over Guanella Pass, with a stop for lunch in Georgetown (Lucha Cantina), then 6, to 93, to my driveway.

All in all it was 670 miles over four days, with a few firsts and a few lessons learned, and it’s sparked my desire to ride the COBDR (at least from Ophir to Steamboat) later this summer!

Dear Rob,

This confirms your reservation for Beginners’ BaseCamp on 4/22/2013 to 5/8/2013. This event meets Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 6:30am to 7:30am.

I was pretty sure that today was the anniversary of my introduction to that thing called Crossfit, and sure enough, a little digging through my email proved that out. Ya gotta wonder, just a little bit, how I could remember such a thing as this. After all, it’s just an excercise gig, right? Just two weeks of showing up at some gym, to try and knock the rust off this old body; to find an outlet for some newfound energy; to get “back in shape”. But the thing is, it ended up being a lot more than just exercise.

As far as getting in shape, I didn’t really even know what that meant, anymore. I was semi-athletic for a couple years in high school, running around a track and through the woods. I also rode some bikes. But really for the last couple of decades, activity-wise, I’d done little more than sit in front of a computer. Oh, and I used to drink a lot. Like, a whole lot. So when I finally quit drinking, I substituted with candy, and reading, and reviewing my life for a little while. And after a couple months of that, I was up to 205 pounds, unable to sleep, and batshit fucking crazy.

So ostensibly it was about getting in shape, but really it was just out of need to do something. And so two years ago I showed up at a local affiliate in Boulder, CO for my introduction to CrossFit. I was joined by 11 other people of various forms: students, moms, jocks, and computer geeks. We were shown how to squat (turns out I’d end up doing many, many, many more squats in the ensuing years and I still don’t do them perfectly). We did a workout: there was running, and push-ups, and sit-ups, and, of course, squats. A couple of rounds of this. I finished last. Fuck.

I came back two days later, mainly because I’d paid for the goddamned classes. We swung some kettlebells and talked about nutrition. A couple days after that, I lifted a barbell and was told of the importance of sleep, which was concident with my newfound desire for it. I started reading about the paleo diet and the benefits of putting butter in your coffee. The latter was definitely something I could get behind.

Over the next few weeks, I attempted to climb a rope, use a rowing machine, do a pull-up, jump rope, and do various weightlifting moves, all with varying degrees of success. I determined my “CrossFit Total”, which was the most weight I could lift (the so-called one-rep max, or “1RM”) for three tries, at three movements: deadlift, front squat, and strict press. Answer: not much (hardly any).

I was sore all the time (still am); I would come home from the gym some days with a relentless cough that took an hour or so to pass (now that only hapens when we do “Fran”). But I was sensing an awakening. I saw a clear relationship between movement, efficiency, and power. The cobwebs were clearing, too. I read about all these different workouts on “the mainsite” – the home of CrossFit, where workouts have been posted since 2003 – and I was struck by the variety of work we were being asked to do. Some days, you’d be lifting heavy stuff, others you’d be running a lot. In between, you’d be asked to climb ropes, or do handstands, or jump on boxes, and all kinds of other shit. Since I’d started going to this place, I hadn’t done the same workout twice. There was a lot to learn, and a lot to perfect. It sure as hell wasn’t boring. As an added bonus, I was learning to appreciate what I had in my own body, which is a fixer-upper with tremendous potential.

After a couple months, I transfered to a different gym, and it’s where I am today, and I can’t believe the luck I have. CrossFit Roots is simply an awesome place do learn and do CrossFit. The coaching staff is superb, the facility somehow manages to be large yet modest, and over 400 people call Roots home (and the coaches call us athletes (and treat us like ones)).

In the ensuing years, I’ve traded some fat for muscle and yet I’m about 20 pounds lighter than I was. I can hop on the bike and go hammer out some miles, or hike a mountain, or run a 5K in about 20 minutes. Like, right now, if need be. But I get the best satisfaction out of just showing up at the gym five times a week, and doing what’s on the board, or whatever Ryan the Olympic Weightlifting Coach tells me to do. Occasionaly I get to try the same workout a second or third time (in two years of this stuff, I’ve yet to do any one workout more than 4 times (and that is awesome)), and revel in the progress. I’ll either do things faster, or with more weight on the bar, or less “scaled” in some other way. Inching closer to doing the workouts “as prescribed” is a goal that never goes away, and always keeps things interesting.

In short, I am a new dude since starting CrossFit, and I hope to continue doing it for a really long time.

This will be more of an admission than anything.

2014 is the first full calendar year since high school that I was sober for the entire thing, and that alone is responsible for everything else. That said, it’s been a good year – a very good one.

So yeah, I quit drinking, in 2013 actually. I quit because I had to, and that’s all that really matters for our purposes right now. What happened next is what’s so interesting; what happened is I began to live again. I actually did many of my sober ‘firsts’ in 2013, since my sobriety date is February 4, 2013: first office celebration at the bar; first business trip; first death in the family; first birthday (which is as close to a relapse as I ever got (so far (knock wood))); first wedding anniversary. You get the idea. What I found was that it’s no big deal. I simply don’t drink any more, and while there was a time when couldn’t imagine doing any of those things without a drink in my hand, I discovered it’s really no big deal – as long as I’m honest with myself about my particular situation, which is that I’m an alcoholic. There are far worse diagnoses, quite frankly.

And so I moved on. And when 2014 rolled around, I was almost a year sober, and marveling at how I’d sailed through the ‘13 holidays without the depression, numbness, and insanity that used to ensue. I owe that to my own “program” of recovery and to a whole lot of friends and family – both in the traditional sense, and, many, of the anonymous variety. You catch my drift.

So 2014 has largely been an exercise in continuing to do what works and continuing to look for what else doesn’t work, figure out why, and act on it. That’s a daily do, and it’s a big part of what recovery is.

I also realized that I can learn a lot from our dog – that things like living in the moment, not caring what you look like, and trusting and loving others are keys. Those, and that bacon is a life force.

Brenda & I went to Europe, touching four countries in just under two weeks, and I remember all of it, even without the pictures. But I got some nice pictures, too. Brenda’s love for travel and for planning really came out in the months leading up to the trip, and she gets all the credit for making that trip as truly awesome as it was.

I discovered I still have a competitive spirit, and am an athlete at heart. I started doing CrossFit, and in that I found a new appreciation for the gift of this human body I was born with (and had been destroying for over 20 years). With CrossFit I am learning how to move, how to get stronger, how to get up early, and how to eat better; the importance of sleep, and the reduction of stress, toward general health. That you get what you give. And after all the exercise, the stretching, the dietary changes, and the sleeping, I feel better. I’m 15 pounds lighter, I can run a 5K in about 20 minutes (with no running outside of what I do at the gym), and I’m off antidepressants. What’s that they say about diet and exercise? Well, what do you know.

And so 2014 was the first time (ever, I think) where I was active through all four seasons, both physically and mentally. When I got back on the bike in the spring, Strava kept telling me I was PR’ing along all my favorite routes. There was no winter fat to burn off, no cobwebs of any sort (because I’d been living, you see). And slowly but surely, by just showing up at the gym and working hard 3-5 times a week, I could do more. Now I can climb a rope, do pull-ups, run fast, jump high, and generally lift heavy shit and fling it around, quickly. I can row a 2,000m “piece” on the erg in a little over seven minutes, and this after straining my abdominal muscle the first time I ever took a pull on one. (I pulled hard, but then my feet slipped out of the straps and I went ass over elbow off the back of the goddamned thing – another first, albeit a somewhat dubious one.) Surely all this moving around has exposed my slightly compromised quadricep tendon for what it is, which is simply the end result of bad mechanics and old age. There was a time when I’d throw my hands up and say “why bother”, but today my attitude is that it’s just something else to manage.

I served as a judge at a CrossFit competition in the spring for a “sober active community” called Phoenix Multisport. Watching these athletes perform – knowing that many of them were recovering drunks and drug addicts, was inspiring to me.

Brenda & I jumped out of an airplane this summer. I believe we will do that again. I know we will do that again. Fuckin’-a. Part of me wants to go for the A license, but there other hobbies competing for my time and money too. It’s a good problem to have.

Another first for 2014 was the discovery that I have been putting my recovery ahead of everything else, which is fine when you are starting out but at some point it’s time to show your colleagues, your friends and mostly your wife that you are firing on all cylinders in all aspects of your life, and that you have debts to be repaid. The nice thing about recovery is that you unearth this shit, but you also get tools and perspective to deal with and address the aforementioned shit. Bonus.

In 2014 I got my motorcycle license, and finally got my long-unused pilot’s license updated with my new address; harbingers of new transportation adventures to come in 2015, perhaps.

Our dear cat Ellie passed away this year. She was a real piece of work, and she is missed. I think another cat is in our future.

I spent a fair bit of time in reflection this year, alternately looking at the past day or the past lifetime, depending on the moment. It’s helped explain a lot and it helps me to move on.

In many ways 2014 was just a grind, and I’m sitting here thinking about how to grind harder in 2015. I guess that’s kinda the point.

In simple terms, I’m grateful for the opportunity to improve in 2015. Did I just say that?

Happy New Year.

• RPG, 1-1-2015

Cancer wins again, and while I keep telling myself there wasn’t anything I could have done to prevent that, I am beating myself up a little bit over the fact that she died on her own, likely suffocating to death.

We knew from the chest x-rays a couple weeks ago that Ellie had metastatic mammary cancer. The Inguinal and Caudial Abdominal glands on her right side were sporting serious tumors, and there was fluid buildup around her lungs. Our excellent Veterinarian was totally straight with me when we reviewed everything last month; surgery was off the table, and chemo was largely pointless–the enemy had simply advanced too far, and we were now in hospice mode.

I think Brenda & I both thought we were old hands at this part, fully able to manage Ellie’s quality of life at this, the end of hers. You look for signs: not eating; hiding; eliminating out of the litter box; and, in Ellie’s case, the big one: labored breathing. Well, the bitch of it is that througout the day yesterday, Ellie exhibited all of those behaviors, and I just kept manufacturing excuses and lowering the bar on what constitutes “quality life”.

Last night, she simply couldn’t get comfortable. I knew we needed to intervene, but I thought she could make it ‘till Monday when her vet’s open, and she could get a chest tap–which in retrospect is totally fucking insane thinking. This morning Brenda came to the bedroom in tears, with Ellie in her arms. She’d found her downstairs, where she’d been retreating to with regularity over the last 48 hours or so. I wasn’t listening.

Brenda looked at me this morning and asked: “are we ever going to get this right?” We’d waited far too long with Emma, but at least when we did decide to end her suffering she was able to drift off peacefully. In Ellie’s case, I allowed her stoicism to fool me into thinking we weren’t quite there yet. The vet’d said to look for open-mouth breathing, exhauhstion. I hung on that “open-mouth” qualifier, ignoring all the other signs. Ellie was a tough broad, and I was happy to look the other way as that tough veil just kept falling apart before my eyes.

So, tough old Ellie ultimately went it alone.

What can I say? Ellie had a tough feline act to follow, with Emma blazing a trail through our hearts for 17 years, and then Hooper, in all of his canine Hooperosity. Ellie’d just given birth to a litter and been neutered when we brought her into our home, at around 4 years of age. She lived under the bed for several weeks until she figured out that none of us was going anywhere and she’d just have to get used to that damned dog. Adapt she did, and Hooper still bears scars from when he tried to get all up in her business when she wasn’t in the mood.

And Ellie, without question, was the Ultimate Queen of Lapcats. I will definitely miss her attempts to push whatever it was that was in the way–laptop, iPad, book, dinner, dog, wife–to get to my lap, or the crook of my arm.

She just had this way about her. She seemed to always know what she wanted, and was generally happy to be sleeping or purring on your lap. She was also kinda stupid, to be honest, and I enjoyed being able to provide a loving home for her since I don’t think she would have lasted long on the street.

Ultimately, Ellie was just happy; I really believe that. I think we gave her a nice life v2.0, after the previous owners let her get knocked up, and then gave her up, pregnant, when they moved, separating her from her brother in the process. These animals deserve better than that, and I think Ellie received better from us–while making us better at the same time.

Ellie deserved a longer life v2.0, but there isn’t anything we could have done about that. So, just have a good thought for Ellie today.

In other words, when doing a lighting calculation, nasty bits at the window can cause the calculation program to take a shit.

In recent years, the Radiance lighting simulation system has been adapted to support lighting simulation of complex fenestration systems (a.k.a. nasty bits at the window), by way of the so-called Radiance Three Phase Method. At work, my co-workers and I are integrating this simulation method into OpenStudio, to allow designers and engineers to more accurately simulate the effects of thoughtful daylighting design.

We do this by using genBSDF to make some general bidirectional scattering distribution functions (BSDFs) to describe the effect of a few different window systems:

• Clear glazing
• Diffuse (translucent) glazing
• Clear glazing with venetian blind
• Clear glazing with daylight redirecting device (Lightlouver) Basically, in our case, the BSDF describes to the simulation what a given hole in the wall does to the light hitting it.

In the case of clear glass, it’s pretty simple. First off, some of the light is reflected (bounces off), some is absorbed into the glass, and the rest goes right through (this bit gets bent a little bit, but gets bent back again as it exits the pane).

In the other cases, you either have a rough surface or translucent material, or some other geometry (slats of a venetian blind, for example) that do more things to the light than simply allow it to pass straight through, and this is where things get shitty for a light-backwards ray tracer like Radiance.

But by moving the ray tracing origin from the point of interest to the window, we can trace rays through those nasty bits and have a better view of the light sources on the other side (like the sun and the sky); this is what genBSDF does. You end up with an XML file that describes, for a bunch of incoming angles, what happens to light. That’s really all it is.

For the OpenStudio project, we needed needed a way to map simple window materials to BSDFs for 3-phase simulation with Radiance. For this, we created a script to generate a simple BSDF library, which you can grab here: https://github.com/NREL/OpenStudio/commit/d9df547e652dfa5c93ee0f92f9d2ce66017be6c5.

This is a rough draft, but might be useful even in its current state. Note the program also adds some “impostor geometry” to represent wall thickness, since OpenStudio does not automatically support thick walls in its model paradigm. This is a major hack, because the effect of the wall thickness is essentially baked into the BSDF, and since the BSDF is unitized for a 1M square glazing unit, the effect of the wall thickness geometry diminishes as you apply the BSDF to ever larger windows. Feel free to edit the script to suit your particular needs.

Getting to the title of the post, here are some renderings of the generated BSDFs, applied to a simple window in a simple room, so you can see (sanity test!) the distribution and – via the falsecolor mapping – the intensity of the light after it passes from outside, through the window (and whatever bits are in there (blinds, light redirecting louver, or sandblasted surface), and into the space:

Some notable things to, uh, note, are:

• The renderings are all normalized so it’s impossible to compare relative intensities, just the distribution

• The falsecolor scales are all the same, so here you can compare the relative intensities.

• The venetian blinds were set to block all direct sun, so all you get is a splash of light bounced up onto the ceiling.

• The Lightlouver does an awesome job of taking all that direct sun and flinging it up onto the ceiling (most ends up onthe wall in this test model since it’s such a shallow space)

• The direct sun patch in the clear glass model is very obviously distorted; this is the result of the direct solar radiation being spread out across three patches of the sky, instead of being concentrated in a tiny disc that subtends half a degree in the sky; this is just the way it’s done with the Three Phase Method (and why the Five Phase Method was developed).

Standing in the middle of Whole Foods with no plan (which is a really bad idea, BTW) I contacted Google for further instructions. After a breif browse of the options, I settled on this one, for turkey & cilantro chili, serves four. Reasonable enough, but the point of making chili is to have a vat of meat percolating on your stove for a while, so I decided to make some adjustments to the recipe, starting with doubling it. I also ventured into new territory with the sweet potato, and was slightly delirious after slicing two of my fingertips open on a cantankerous can of tomato paste about halfway through the process, so as I put the whole mess on the simmer I did not have high hopes for this endeavor.

Which is why I’m writing all this down. Because it “turned out awesome” (as was often heard on American Chopper). So without further ado, here is my take on Cat’s Turkey & Cilantro chili recipe. The original ingredients list follows (with my adjustments in parentheses), and the directions are just slightly modified from the original.

Turkey & Cilantro Chili

serves 4 (serves 6-8)

• 12 oz ground turkey (two pounds of ground turkey)
• 1 sweet potato, peeled and diced into large chunks (I used two, would use even one or two more next time)
• 1 white onion, finely chopped (two large white onions)
• 2 cloves garlic, minced (9 cloves; I have no idea what two cloves of garlic even means)
• 1 tbsp butter (3 tbsp butter, plus 1 tbsp coconut oil)
• 1 tsp cumin (1 tbsp cumin)
• 2 tsps paprika (2 tbsp paprika, plus a tbsp or so of chili powder, plus some onion powder I had lying around)
• 1 jalapeno, finely chopped (2 jalapenos, cored and seeded)
• 1 poblano pepper, finely chopped (OK this I left alone, but it was a pretty big poblano)
• 1 bunch (3 oz) fresh cilantro, finely chopped (I also used one bunch, but this was by accident. I’d definitely double this amount next time)
• 3 large tomatoes, roughly chopped (5 large tomatoes)
• 8 oz tomato paste (12 oz tomato paste)
• 1 1/2 cups chicken broth (4 cups mushroom stock)

OK, here we go.

• Melt 2 tbsp of the butter and coconut oil in a large saucepan over medium-high heat.
• Add the onion, and throw some salt and pepper in there while you’re at it. Let that work for a few minutes while you chop other shit.
• Add the garlic and the peppers. Throw in another tbsp of butter, because everything looks dry and thirsty. Saute over a medium heat for five minutes. (optional: cut yourself on a can of tomato paste, and after refusing to accept any help, enlist help from spouse for next step, while you curse and hold a tissue on your fingers)
• Add the turkey, breaking it up with a wooden spoon, and sprinkle in the cumin and paprika. Let fry until the turkey colours then stir in the tomato paste.
• Toss the tomatoes into the pot, followed by the potatoes.
• Pour in the broth. Add the chili powder, the onion powder if you have it (1 tsp or so),
• Bring to a boil then reduce the heat. Let it simmer for 45 minutes, stirring regularly, but not continuously like Henry Hill’s brother in “Goodfellas”.
• Turn off the heat, add the cilantro and stir it in. Go apply a proper dressing on your fingers.
• Eat.

Notes

• I thought that would be way too much tomato paste, but it turned out awesome. The whole thing totally changes once you put in the cilantro.
• Speaking of cilantro, I meant to double the amount but messed up. I still think more would be better, but maybe not twice as much. The original recipe also simmers the cilantro over heat for 5 mins, whereas I just put it all on at the end, off the heat. Somewhere in all of that lies the magic answer.
• Speaking of heat, the “heat” was just right, just a slow burn. The jalapenos were medium sized for jalapenos, and the poblano was probably about 9” long. I loosely cored and seeded them; in other words, there was still some core and seeds in there, just not much.
• I added a couple of spoonfulls of lime juice to mine, and that helped it turn out awesome.
• Brenda added some Emmentaler cheese to hers. I believe she felt that was awesome.
• The sweet potatoes really were awesome. For the amount of everything else in there, I would definitely add one or two more to the pot. I can’t remember which ones I bought, but they were kinda off-white-colored inside, not the orange I’m used to seeing. They tasted really good, not too sweet at all. (Can you tell I never used to eat sweet potatoes before getting into paleo?)