best chili recipe, seriously.

Normally I am very impressed with the Smitten Kitchen blog's recipes and photography, but I saw this recipe for beef chili with sour cream and cheddar biscuits and I thought, gross! Look at those carrots, they shouldn't be sliced like that! Where is the deep red chili color? This is what I imagine gruel to look like! I'm not a victorian-era orphan, why would I want to eat like Oliver Twist?

And then I read the recipe, which was apparently adapted from a super old issue of gourmet, and I thought, wow, I make a much better chili than that. I should blog about it. I don't use chili powder in my chili, I use a ton of ancho chiles and other spices. The base of my chili is one yellow onion, diced, two cloves of garlic, minced, about 1 1/4 cups of seeded and diced ancho chiles (soaked first in warm water to soften), 1 large red bell pepper, diced, 1/2 green bell pepper, diced, and 1 minced jalapeno (I had a habanero this time around and used that instead). Spice-wise I add cumin, crushed coriander, and cayenne pepper. Usually I make this chili vegan, adding pink beans and crushed tomatoes to it after sauteeing the other ingredients, but as I had 2 lbs of ground beef from Marlow and Daughters in my fridge (thanks Jacob!), I added that.

It's best to do all the chopping ahead of time, because the sauteeing part of the chili is really quick. As I mentioned previously, I usually don't use meat, but in this case I browned the beef before adding the chopped vegetables.

The key to the vegetables is sauteeing the onions first in a little bit of oil, then adding garlic, then spices (I use about 2 tbsp cumin, 2 tsp coriander, and 3/4 tsp cayenne at the outset, then add salt + additional spices to taste later). The onions are great at gripping the spices and thus dispersing them evenly throughout the chili as other ingredients are added. After the onions, garlic, and spices have heated until fragrant, I add the ancho chiles, and stir until the reddish color of the chilis has colored the mixture, about a minute or two.

I then add the peppers and cook, stirring, for a few minutes. I added the beef at this point as well. Cook until the peppers start to soften and take on a bit of the deep red color of the chiles.

Then add a 28 oz can of crushed tomatoes (note: I am from Chicago, not Texas, though at least 1 Texan and 1 Arizonan have eaten this chili and declared it delicious), give a thorough stir to the mixture, turn the heat to low and simmer covered for 20-30 minutes. If you're cooking without meat, let it go longer--you won't have to worry about the meat being overcooked. Below is the final product, as you can see you don't need to use chili powder(which quite frankly usually consists mostly of ground dried chiles and the other spices used in this recipe) to obtain that deep red color, and what you'll be left with is a spicy, high-flavor, low-fat(if meatless), thick-consistency chili that is pretty laissez-faire and very nutritious.

Oh also I made those biscuits she wrote about and hot damn, were those things delicious. They were even better when we froze the leftover dough and baked them the next day. Do yourself a favor and whip these up, they take no time at all, I made them from start to finish while the chili was simmering. Though honestly, just serve them alongside chili, that picture with the split biscuit with chili in it just made me depressed.

meatless/cheeseless enchiladas

Alex Iezzi's mom recently sent him a big package full of hot peppers she grew in her garden in Arizona. He handed them over to me, requesting something spicy. At first I thought I would make a noodle dish of some sort, but Veronica suggested enchiladas and I wholeheartedly agreed. I roasted a mixture of serrano, jalapeno, and habanero peppers with a drizzle of oil until slightly charred and softened, and in the meantime boiled purple and idaho potatoes on the stove. The jalapeno and habanero peppers were minced and added to a sauce of crushed san marzano tomatoes with garlic and a few drizzles of molasses and seasoned with salt; the serrano peppers were roughly chopped and added to the filling.

The filling consisted of a diced onion sauteed with one clove of chopped garlic, 1/2 green bell pepper, 1 red bell pepper, 1 15oz can of pink beans, and the just-tender, drained potatoes. I cooked the filling in a large saute pan and mashed it with a potato masher to break up the potatoes but not so much as to totally homogenize the texture. I spread some sauce over the bottom of a 13x9 roasting pan and dipped tortillas (individually warmed over the stove by Veronica) in the sauce, then filled them, then rolled them up. This is a great and inexpensive way to feed a large group with mixed dietary restrictions, because it is so healthy, filling, and delicious no one will complain, and Alex Craig may even ask, "what kind of meat is in this?"