Chili Lime Beef Wraps: A Tale of Love, Loss, and Excuses

Looking at our blog from time to time and calculating the number of days that pass between entries sometimes, I could see how you would think we are lazy and never live up to our promises.

I could see that.

I could see it because, for the most part, you'd be right. A very successful, well-loved businessman in Cleveland, Umberto Fideli, once told me, "Always underpromise and overdeliver." He was speaking to a group of us on the topic of networking at a PR firm at which I was formerly employed. Mr. Fideli is someone that I greatly admire, and I took his words to heart. Why then, do we say that we'll do one thing on this blog and often do another? Well, for a few reasons.

First and foremost, you may have figured out at this point that I am in many ways the "captain" of this blog, having started it and, for the most part, having managed it over the course of its existence. I am not the most entertaining writer and I am not the best cook, but part of running something is knowing when to recruit people more talented than yourself. All of this being said, I get fanciful ideas about how to improve the blog from time to time, and in my zeal I share these ideas with you via blog posts. In my excitement, I often talk to Matty and Deering about how we could pump out more posts, try new recipes, improve our social media presence, and generally kick a bit more ass around here. They nod, say something along the lines of, "sounds good, man", and then go about their lives.

I do not fault my compatriots for being busy people, but the fact of the matter is that we are a bit too disorganized and generally tied-up to get a lot of stuff done around here. It isn't that we don't try - take the subject of this post, for instance. Matty, Britta, and I made "chili lime beef wraps" about a month ago, had a great time making them, and they even tasted pretty darn good. We had our girlfriends over for dinner while we made the wraps; it was a lot of fun. When it was all over, I talked to Matty and asked him to write up the post on the wraps and he agreed to. Here we are a month later now, the recipe has been lost (it was on one of those recipe cards you find around Heinen's or any other grocery store), and he never got around to writing the post.

The chili lime beef wraps were not the first casualty of our forgetfulness... We have made dishes before, some very intricate, expensive ones, even (especially when Deering is involved because he knows what he is doing more than we brothers do); we just forget to write up the posts, lose recipes, or can't recall details until it is too late to rectify the situation.

If you are reading this far and are thinking to yourself, "Boy, this is the longest excuse I've read all day", I feel for you. I'll cut out my ramblings soon enough; I just want to let you guys all know how things work around here. We haven't been fair to our readers, we haven't undertaken enough culinary projects, and we haven't got our crap together as far as organization is concerned. I'll ask that my fellow Conquistadors sign off on this post so that it is not simply one more "pseudo-promise" that we're going to go back on.

I am going to dedicate more time to making sure that this blog is something that I can be proud of at all times.

I know that blogging (at least for the vast majority of people) is about fun, and I intend to keep it that way. This isn't going to become work, but I still want to treat it with respect. I don't see us getting back any of the posts that we've "lost" in the past, but I also don't intend to let any more slip through the cracks. Conquistadors are adventurers, and sometimes you take a wrong turn or fall in a pit of quicksand/snakes/Alamo Soup. You gotta know how to learn from your mistakes and press on, more savvy than you started out.


Fall is a ballin' season and there are a lot of fun recipes (and beer pairings) to go along with it. Let's make the most of it and enjoy the culinary landscape this autumn, together.