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| The guts of a good meal |
A lot of my basic, go to recipes are variations on something my mom used to make. Classic comfort food. This is a chili that I have been making since forever. For a long time it was a never-the-same-way-twice kind of dish, but I have settled into some basic proportions that work pretty well. I make this almost every week - in large volume - and it makes lunches, snacks and forgot to make dinner nights a little easier. It is made from almost entirely pantry items - and if you freeze ground beef you can have the ingredients on hand all the time.
I will start with my theory of chili. I like to make a really concentrated flavor base in the onions and spices - it will seem way too spicy at this point; it burns my eyes a bit. Then I add beef (vegetarian option too - I will make a note at the bottom); then the tomatoes, let it simmer to pick up all the yum. Then beans (and sometimes corn) and let it simmer for as long as there is before dinner.
My cousin claims that every recipe her mom ever gave her starts with - first you take an onion, chop it up and cook it in oil. That is where this starts too. For this quantity, 2 medium-large onions. I keep about a third of a cup out of the chili to put on top of my bowl at the table (no one else in my house likes this, if more do at your house, you'll need more raw onion, obviously). I heat oil (2 tablespoons-ish, olive, canola, etc) in a large stock pan, and then add the onions and a scoop of pre-chopped garlic (feel free to chop your own, but I got over that after my first baby was born - gotta learn to let some things go). Sometimes I add diced carrots here - I like the color, and always good to have more vegetables around. Now...spices!
I use a lot of spice in this dish (but it isn't too spicy for my kids, 4 & 9), and spices are expensive. So I would either get them in the bulk spice section, or even easier, I usually get these packets from the Mexican food section of the grocery store. Not all of the stores I go to carry them, but it is worth seeking them out. About a dollar for one of these -- spices in a jar are usually 3-4 times more expensive. I use one bag of chili powder and one of ground cumin (1 oz each), then a teaspoon or two of black pepper, and the same of oregano.
Since I am a visual cook, this is what I mean by 'until it looks right' for the spices in the onions:
Stir them all up cook until the onions are soft and the flavors get all aromatic and yum. Then put them in a separate bowl. Add the ground beef, a little bit of oil if it is very lean, and brown it in the same pan - this will get some spice into the meat as there will be a residue left in the pan when you take the onions out.
The rest of the construction of this dish is opening cans and pouring things into the pan, so not super photogenic. Add the onions back in, then the tomatoes, then the beans.
My proportion is 4-5 cans of beans (14.5 oz), rinsed and drained to 2 large (28oz) cans of chopped tomatoes with their juice. I like the whole tomatoes in tomato sauce, and then I just roughly chop the tomatoes with kitchen scissors. I like the texture, but I don't always bother with it. If it seems a little dry (as it may when I use 5 cans of beans) I will add tomato sauce if I have it, or beer, or water and a bit of beef stock concentrate. This time I added some frozen sweet corn at the very end. I like the sweet against the spicy and my kids like corn a lot.
Ingredients:2 large onions, diced
1 Tbs chopped garlic
1/2 cup diced carrots (optional)
2-3 tablespoons olive or canola oil
1-1.5 pounds lean ground beef (I use 7%)
1 oz chili powder
1 oz cumin
1 tbs black pepper
1 tbs oregano
4 14.5 oz cans beans (kidney, black, pinto)
2 28 oz cans of chopped tomatoes
1/2 cup frozen corn (optional)
to top:
chopped onion
grated cheese
corn chips or saltine crackers.
Veggie variation:
I used to be a vegetarian, and I would use textured vegetable protein (TVP) in this chili. If I re-hydrated it and added it to the onions and spice mixture, it soaked up the flavor nicely. Then no need to remove onions to do the meat, just add tomatoes as soon as the onions (and carrots) are softened.
Barley:
My husband thinks barley is a magic food, so I sometimes add about a cup of barley to this, and add some extra liquid (about a cup and a half, two cups). This can be water, beer, stock, etc. Then it needs to simmer at least 45 minutes. I like it this way ok, but the leftovers take on a different texture as the barley continues to soak up the moisture in the chili. It is just fine, just not the way I want it all the time.
Enjoy - let me know how it turns out!
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