Chicken Chili

Wintertime calls for heat. Heat in the home, and heat in the belly. This is a nice, mild chili that's spicy enough to be cozy, but still painless.

The recipe I started with came from the Food network, and it was ok. But it looked more like a stew than a nice, thick chili. So I modified a bit, and finally came up with a recipe that I like.

Ingredient lists for chili can get to be be pretty long... thankfully this one isn't as involved as some of the other chilis I've seen out there.

Ingredient list:
1 Onion, chopped
2-3 stalks celery, finely chopped
3 medium poblano peppers, seeded and finely chopped
2-3 jalapeno or serrano peppers, seeded and finely chopped
1 clove garlic
1 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp ground coriander
1/4 tsp ground cayenne pepper... or more, to taste.
2 chicken or turkey breasts, cubed, or 1 lb ground turkey
2 cans cannelini beans, rinsed
2 cans sweet corn
2 C chicken broth
2/4 tsp dried oregano

First step, finely chop the peppers, celery, and the onion.

Second step, prepare the meat. The original recipe called for ground turkey, which works, but I wanted a more textured experience, rather than a bowl of mush. I've been using chicken breasts, and rather than cubes, I've been cutting quarter-sized slices. I keep my chicken in the freezer, and when it's time to cook, I thaw them half-way, so they're soft enough to cut through, but firm enough to work with easily. For this recipe, I slice them lengthwise into inch-wide strips, and then chop those down in 1/8" slices. It's a thick enough slice to provide that meaty texture, but it's not so big that it's an effort.

The original recipe was more like a stew than a nice, thick chili. So, to thicken things up, I pour half a can of corn, with the juice, into the food processor with half a can of beans, and the garlic clove, and puree everything.

To start, pour the olive oil into a dutch oven. (A soup pot will work well if you don't have a dutch oven. If you're in the market for a dutch oven, I recommend looking for an oval shaped one, for reasons I'll get into.) Add the peppers and onions and celery, and cook until soft, which is typically 8-10 minutes.

Add the cumin, coriander, and cayenne, and stir them in until the pot starts to get fragrant... typically another minute or two.

Add the meat, and cook until it's no longer pink. (2-3 minutes, or longer if it's still half-frozen.)

Add the beans, the pureed mix, the chicken broth, and the oregano. cook for another 25 minutes, partially covered. (This is where the oval pot shines... rotate the lid 90 degrees, and it will still sit solidly on top of the pot. )

After 25 minutes, stir in the corn, and cook for 5 more minutes.

My personal suggestion is to serve this up with some home made corn bread. Yum. (Ariel has been making the corn bread to go with this chili, and it's been fantastic.) Recipe makes around 6 servings, which means it's something you can cook up a pile of and use for lunches during the week. Chili smells great in the microwave, and the yellow and green colors of this particular

Date night! Tuna stuffed peppadew peppers.

 

Last Saturday I made rice pilaf, and tuna-stuffed cherry peppers. The pilaf was ok, but the flavor was so much mellower than the Big Wow Mouthful that came from the cherry peppers that I wouldn't pair them up again. The pilaf was very soothing, but it just couldn't keep up with the peppers. Something more acidic, like a salad with a vinaigrette, is called for here.

On Wednesday, I brought some of the leftover cherry peppers to work for lunch. And half-way through lunch, I noticed something interesting. During most lunch hours, I just shovel away until I feel full, have another bite or two, and go back to whatever I was doing. This is why I used to be convinced that there's no way that Mediterranean diets would work for most Americans: we're just used to high volume, and almost-good-enough quality. So, we shovel away, while we go on with our lives. No wonder we all talk with our mouths full.

But I wasn't doing that with the stuffed peppers. Individiually, each stuffed pepper isn't a mouth-filler in terms of volume. But between the sweet and spicy peppers, the tuna, the turmeric, and the balsamic, there's a lot of flavor going on, so it's actually more enjoyable to eat only one at a time, at a more relaxed pace. As a result I found myself enjoying my lunchtime more slowly, and in a more contemplative mood. This was a much different kind of experience for me, and it's setting the bar, I think, for what to look for in a meal, and in a recipe.

I'll be making these again, but this time I'll be making them to bring in for lunch... for a week.

This recipe was adapted from the version published by Eating Well, which called for capers instead of turmeric.

Ingredients for stuffed cherry peppers:

-2, 16 oz jars of peppadew peppers.
-3 cans of white albacore tuna in water
-Extra Virgin Olive Oil
-Fresh lemon juice.
-Fresh lime juice. (optional)
-Turmeric
-Balsamic vinegar.

Peppadew peppers: Trader Joe's has them, Whole Foods has them. I'm sure other stores have them, too... typically near the olives. I got some from Whole foods that morning, and went back to TJs to get more later on. Whole Foods cost twice as much, but the peppers were a lot less squishy, and easier to stuff, so it's a draw, really.

To prepare the tuna for stuffing into the peppers, you mix it with the olive oil, lemon juice, and turmeric. I'd never really worked with turmeric before. I know that it's one of the spices that make up curry as we know it, but it was still new to me. The first thing worth mentioning is that it will stain anything yellow. So don't make more of a mess than you have to. It has its own flavor, and there's definitely a threshold where it's just overpowering. So, I spent some of Saturday afternoon experimenting with proportions.

I think it's worth doing the experimenting to see just what your own taste buds are ok with. Even more turmeric started to make the tuna taste less fishy, which I liked, but the flavor from the spice was simply overpowering. It's also worth doing the experiments with the peppadew peppers on hand: the combined flavors can be interesting. I kept half of a lime on-hand that I would lick in between tastings to clear my palate, so that I could taste the differences. I had to... after a while, everything just tasted like EVOO and turmeric, and it was hard to tell the differences between the different mixes.

What I came up with, I think, was something close to 3 tbsp of EVOO, 2 tbsp of lemon juice, 1 tbsp of lime juice, and 1.5 tbsp of turmeric. Combine this mixture in a bowl with the tuna, and mix it up with a fork.

There's not much preparation that needs to be done to the peppers, just strain them. I set the steamer into one of my sauce pans to catch all of the brine from the jar. Not every pepper is going to be physically intact enough to be stuffed, and this way I was able to put the brine back in the jar with the leftover peppers, to be used in something else. And the steamer worked well enough as a work bowl, so I could sort through what was there, instead of fishing them out of the jar.

While I know it should go unsaid that you should wash your hands before cooking just about anything, this is one of those times when you're really going to be touching pretty much everything... you'll be holding a pepper in one hand, and using a combination of fork and finger to push the tuna into the peppers. Clean fingers are critical.

I used a casserole dish to hold the peppers after they'd been stuffed.

The last step was to pour about 1/4 cup of balsamic into a pan of some kind, and simmer it down for a while, until there's about 2 tbsp worth of balsamic glaze. I used more, and reduced it further. What I ended up with was basically caramel in consistency. I did the reducing in the afternoon, put the result in a small glass bottle, and put it into the fridge. I had to microwave the bottle to get the glaze to pour out.

Pour the glaze over the prepared peppers. And enjoy... slowly.

Crock-Pot sauce.

Yes, I made two batches of sauce tonight. The small batch was for dinner. I wanted to make this batch to last us for a few days or a week, as leftovers or for lunches, while Ariel was in school, and I was busy with work at the shop.

Ingredients:

The big 5 for pasta sauce, in my mind, are onions, meat, garlic, bell peppers, and tomatoes. The rest is mostly sauce and seasoning.

Other ingredients:

Yes, all this food will fit into that pot.

-Pasta Sauce.
-Tabasco
-Chili powder
-Salt and Pepper
-Olives
-Scallions
-Mushrooms
-Sweet Italian Sausage
-Hot Italian Sausage
-Bay Leaves

Because of all of the stuff that was going into the pot, I figured it would be a good idea to start by cooking the onions down a bit, to caramelize them a bit, and reduce the volume. Apparently 2.5 large onions is the most I can fit into my small food processor... it all came out like a sand castle.

I got going by laying a bed of flavorful stuff in the bottom of the crock pot. Convection currents will carry the flavors up and around the pot, allowing them to soak into everything. I fed a bunch of mushrooms through the food processor. I used the cuisinart mixing blade to handle a mix of more mushrooms, garlic cloves, and half of a jalapeno pepper. I also made a separate mix of a tomato and some olives. The mushrooms and both mixes went into the crock pot, with 8 bay leaves.

I sliced bell peppers into spears and fed them through the food processor. The main reason for doing it this way is to make sure that they go through the slicing disc at 90 degrees. If they have room to squirm in the chute, they'll bend over, and the slices come out a lot longer. It's a minor issue, really, but it helps.

Next big ingredient was the sausage. They were uncooked from the store, which means they were going to be very hard to slice. The easiest thing to do is to cook them... so I threw them into a frying pan to get them started. Once the sausages were a little bit cooked on each side, I pulled them out, cut them lengthwise, through the uncooked part, and started slicing them into smaller chunks. Having the cooked section helped to stabilize them enough that I was able to slice them more easily, and once that was done, I threw them all into the crock pot.

Next I chopped up some tomatoes and threw them on top of the sausage. On top of that I tossed in the sliced bell peppers. On top of all of that, I put a small pile of ground turkey. And then I added a jar and a half of store-bought spaghetti sauce. I put a little water into each jar to rinse out the dregs of the sauce that remained, and poured all that into the pot, too.

You may be noticing a theme here: "I cut this up, and threw it into the pot." Or, the more complicated version, "I cut this up, cooked it a bit, and threw it into the pot." This is one of the things that makes the crock pot so nice to use in a small kitchen. You need enough space to cut up one thing at a time, and space enough for the crock pot itself.

Tip for the mess-conscious. Even fi you have a butcher-block topped counter-top, or island, it's best to still use a cutting board. The reason why is pretty simple. At this point I'd cut up a bunch of vegetables, smeared the cutting board with sausage grease, then cut up tomatoes, which is both wet, and hard to do on a lubricated board... and so on. In short, the surface was a greasy, wet mess. Having a work surface that can be carried to the sink and washed off is much better than something that's going to sit there and absorb the grease and whatever else through the knife cuts in the surface. The last thing you want is a permanent kitchen surface that's contaminated with old grease and bacteria.

Last step was to add carrots. This is a tip my mother taught me, apparently it helps reduce the acidity in the sauce. It's worked for me so far, so I cut up some long spears, and shoved them all the way through to the bottom of the pot.

 Last step: cover, turn the crock pot on, and wait.

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Crock pot cooking is an entirely different animal from regular meal cooking, because the crock pot is a slow cooker. The problem tonight was that I should have gotten going on prep a lot earlier. The pot was finally topped off around 9, which means I'll be up for a while waiting for it to be done. The original plan was to start the whole crock pot early enough to eat some of it for dinner. Instead I made dinner, and then got going on the crock pot full of sauce. I started laying out the ingredients for this sauce pretty much as soon as tonight's dinner was in the frying pan and simmering. 

This is something that is better left for the week-end in general, because there's all day to work on it. That, or prep the ingredients the night before, refrigerate overnight, and start the pot in the morning. Dad used to stew pot roast that way, and be able to come home to an awesome dinner that had been cooking all day. Another day, sometime soon.

Last thing that bears mentioning... filling a crock pot takes a fair amount of stuff. And even cutting things up one thing at a time, there's still a need for a surface that will hold everything that's not currently being chopped up, processes, cooked, or whatever. While the active surface required only has to be big enough to hold the crock pot and the cutting board, there is a need to store everything else nearby.

--------------------Next Morning-----------------------

So, I shut the pot off after 3 hours. I probably could have left it on low overnight, but since I was leaving the sauce in there anyway, I figured it would continue to cook with just the heat that was in it already. I was right.

Final yield:

Now that's a sauce that looks like a meal...

Filled both Jars to the right, as well as that huge tupperware bin. Jars went in the freezer, bin went in the fridge.