chili

18 Mar 2007

My friend Melissa convinced me to write up a “recipe” for the chili I make, so she could submit it along with its picture, to some recipe site (update pending). Here it is:

This is chili with beans. If you think chili shouldn’t have beans, that’s fine, but you’re wrong and we can never be friends.

Clean the pot from the last batch. (Optional, but preferred.) Put the pot on the stove. Add enough olive oil to coat the base, and dump in as many cloves of garlic (minced/crushed) you have that aren’t obviously too old to use. Add 1 whole yellow onion, diced. Add a couple of chiles sliced thin, and sautee that whole mess until it smells really good.

Add two pounds or so of ground beef. I tend to use chuck, but you can use sirloin too, as long as you like your chili without grease, which is cool, I guess, if you’re in to that sort of thing. Brown the meat. Drain whatever grease you think would be obscene to actually consume.

I like to add some spices at this point – it doesn’t really affect the final product, but it sure as hell smells good. I toss in some onion powder, garlic powder, and a healthy dose (2-3 tablespoons) of chile powder. I mix that up with the meat as it browns.

Once the meat is browned, the recipe gets easier. First, let the meat cool. If you’re impatient you can proceed without doing this, but the hot meat/grease in the pot could burn slightly whatever you add next. Once cooled a bit, Crack open a few cans of tomato sauce, a few cans of diced tomatoes, and dump them in. Then, open a few cans of black beans and put them in the pot also. Then (you
know where this is going), open some cans of red beans, preferrably the ones you can buy in the spicinated sauce already. Put those in there too. Add the rest of the sliced (thin) chiles, and then top it off with chile powder, garlic powder, onion powder, and a little bit of salt. (Again, mostly to make it smell good – you can always salt to taste when you actually eat it.) I usually add as much cumin and chile powder as I can find in the house. Your tastes may dictate otherwise.

At this point, you can admire the pot and meditate on how pretty it looks, and how it’d be a damn shame to eat it. Then you get hungry and stir it all in. Now you have to let it cook down a bit, so that the chiles can soften and transmit their ass-blasting spiciness into the dish as a whole.

It’s done whenever you can’t stand it anymore and decide to eat it.

Serves 1 single guy for a week or so, or 1 group of drunk assholes for one night.