Kick Ass Chili

Looks like I ordered up the photos rather out of order.. Anyhow ,you'll get the idea. Essentially, on Joyce's last big trip abroad,she brought me backa bag of "Ass-Kickin' Chili Fixin's" all you need in one little sack ( except for the beef) to make a serious batch of Ass-kicking chili.
whenever you want to economize, this is the way to do it....with dried beans. All they need is to be soaked for 8 hours ( overnight) and then rinsed clean and slo-cooked for 2-3 hours. This little bag of beans contained a mix of black beans and pinto beans.. (brown and whites that look like small pinto ponies.) You can see the photo--- the black mixture boiling away on the stove...that is ym beans. They need to be tended,because the idea is to not flood them with water, just to keep them slightly covered as they simmer. 2-3 cups of dry beans will make you a lot of chili...see the pic of my chef sized fry pan. It was full to the top at the end.
Once you put your beans on to simmer, you can go ahead and chop up a big onion and fry it up in a little olive oil, until it is soft. Toss in a few tablespoons of chopped garlic for more flavour.
Once cooked, take the onions out of the pan and reserve them while you brown the ground hamburger or chopped beef. once the beef isn't pink anymore, add the onions back into the pan and from there you can add two or three big cans of chopped tomatoes, a can of tomato sauce and a can of tomatoe paste. Then you stir it all up and add some more chopped garlic ( 2 tblspns) and that little packet of spices that came int he Kick-Ass bag!
Seriously, the spices were a mixture of chili powder, garlic powder and hotter than hell powder! I suspect it had a little of the Habenero pepper spice in it, because it definately clears up the sinuses. The directions went on to say that I could add some of the habenero pepper spice to make it mildly hot...right...It is already freaking hot! Thats ok, I added a good dash of salt,some chili sauce and some dried chipotle spice and now it is even hotter! I skipped the habenero altogether, figuring that I could unintentionally kill someone if I even added a grain of it!

So go ahead, add your chili spices, garlic spices, and perhaps some dried onion spice and if all else fails...have a packet of chili mix on hand to give it all the flavour you need! if you like it hot, then add some cayenne pepper or some hot sauce.

The bottom line is that it didn't take all that long to make,and it makes a truckload. I think I used to bother adding too much in the way of green peppers and celery and stuff that probably doesn't belong in a good chili,unless you are making a vegetarian one...and then you can add extra veggies like zuccini, squash, red peppers, egg plant ,whatever...well,not broccoli.

So there, the chili is made and ready to be frozen tomorrow morning once I have it all cooled down. Maybe I will take a bowl full to work.

Did I ever tell you about the time Morgan found a sack of kidney beans on the train in a boxcar that came from Georgia or somewhere far south of the border?
Joyce called me up and asked me if I wanted some beans, and I said sure... She said "Bring a big jar,as there is about 25 pounds of them!"
I toodled over and got my giant pickle jar filled with beans and then thought that the best thing to do would be to make a pot of chili with them. I went through the steps I outlined above...soaked the beans overnight, and in the morning, I simmered them for three hours and then tested a bean to see if it was soft.
Well, it wasn't.
It was still rock hard..so I kept cooking it for another hour , just to be certain it would be soft enough for my chili.
Upon sampling some of the beans for the second time, I was still P.O'd to find that they were no more cooked than I was.
I finally stirred them into the meat nad tomatoe mixture and set them on to simmer.
Hours later, and the beans were still what I would call" Extremely Firm!"
I called up Joyce to see if she had any idea how long they had been on the train... Morgan said it was could have been a long tiome..the train had come up from Missippi...and Joyce's beans were having the same problem....rock hard and no sign of softening up. I bet they were on that train since WW1!
We both wound up tossing out all of our beans...so never count your beans before they are cooked through!








"The Creator"