chili

As spring break draws to a close, I am on a small cooking spree.  In a few days I’ll be back to my overloaded  class schedule and cooking will be limited at best.

For today at least, I have the luxury of making bread, focaccia and chili! And hopefully these cookies later…

it looks so pretty!

Regular loaf bread is fairly easy to make and if you are interested, I recommend browsing around the King Arthur Flour website. They have pretty good instructions (though they can be overly fussy sometimes, and you can use regular flour instead of their brand) and good resources if you run into problems.

The focaccia  recipe I use is from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice  by  Peter Reinhart and it makes one of the most delicious breads I have ever tasted. Alas, it is far to complicated for this me to put on the site (for now?). HOWEVER if you like bread making and you want to improve your skills, I highly recommend this book. The recipes are great and it will help you prefect your technique. It’s not the cheapest, and the recipes can be complicated, but if you’re into bread it is totally worth it.

So

On to the chili.

I have never made chili before. Will this be good? Terrible? It is a mystery to me! But 9 hours from now (and by the end of this post) hopefully we will learn it is delicious together.

Okay, so I started with a 2qt crock-pot that my dad bought for me once, a bag of dried beans, a red pepper and some tomatoes.

For the 2qt, I used a 16oz bag of dried pinto beans, one pepper, one tomato and about a half can of tomato paste.

Rinse the beans and pick out any icky ones. Cut up the pepper and tomato (a little bit but not too much! or it will cook away to nothingness) and then stick it in the crock-pot over low heat.

About three hours later I chopped up an onion and put it in a pan with some ground beef, and cooked it on medium heat until the beef turned brown (and stirring occasionally.) this did not take very long. Then I added it to the crockpot. Or tried to anyway – it turns out that these quantities don’t quite fit into a 2qt crock-pot. Beans expand when you add water (which I forgot about – oops) and it was hard to fit the meat in.

Oh well!

9 hours later – tasting time!

result:

DISAPPOINT. It was not delicious!

It is okay, but a little bland. I should have added cumin and lemon at the beginning of this as well as salt. There was chili pepper, but it kind of disappeared flavor-wise and left only a vague spicyness.

Verdict: okay, but boring.

The next day I discovered that a liberal sprinkling of lemon juice, feta cheese, cilantro and sirarcha sauce makes it pretty tasty. Seriously, sirarcha sauce will fix anything (and actually so will the other three things – so it’s practically an invincible combination!)

Next time I will have a much higher meat-to-beans ratio, add spices at the beginning and include more vegetables. I’ll make sure to post the updated version at that time.

For now, I’ll just stick to bread.