Yesterday wasn’t much fun. I was pretty much incapacitated with a headache that felt like someone was trying to nail one of my eyes shut. I’ve still got a bit of an achy remnant, but I’m better enough that I’m at work. I’ve got lunches ready to go for quite a while too. Monday night I’d put a crock pot together in preparation for doing some beer-based chili, and I was feeling well enough late Tuesday to finish it off.
I don’t tend to use a fixed recipe when I’m making chili… I consider it more like variations on a theme. So long as the basic motive of tomato and bean are there, I can improvise a fugue with the meat and spices along with a counterpoint of additional ingredients.
Ok, ignore that last bit. I sound incredibly pompous…
When I make chili, I make a LOT of chili… Usually, I start out with two to three pounds of ground turkey or chopped chicken, which I brown in a pan with three or four crushed garlic cloves and a large chopped onion. This time I used ground turkey. Also, instead of browning it, I cooked it overnight in the crock pot. I put in the garlic and onion as usual, poured in enough beer to cover, and let it simmer away overnight on low.
By mid-day Tuesday I was able to ignore my headache long enough to pay attention to the now well-cooked turkey. I drained it and transferred it to a large stew pot, again covering it with beer. Then I added 2 large cans of red kidney beans, a couple of spoonfulls of chili powder, a dash of salt, a large can of tomato sauce, a large can of diced tomatoes and 1 can of creamed corn, which I had mistaken for regular sweet corn.
Oops.
I let it simmer for a couple hours, stirring it every twenty minutes or so. By about nine at night it had cooked down well, and was very tasty. Yes, even with the creamed corn.
So, there are about half a dozen containers of turkey-beer-chili in the freezer, and each one should be good for at least two meals.
An interesting thing that seems to be developing is the idea of an internet markup langage specefically designed for exchanging recipes… It seems like a good idea, and if I hear anything more about it, I’ll probably adopt it…