chili/chile & basic Texas chili recipe
Hello, fellow Os!
Just wanted to share some information from my local newspaper about a food
ingredient that’s been brought up lately. The New World’s hottest fruit:
chiles!
Chiles are the fruits, chili is the final dish made from meat, chiles &
sometimes beans. We… er, *I* often see chili recipes made with the acidic
fruit tomato.
Most Texans feel that “real” chili is made with meat & chiles, without beans. As
time progressed chili recipies diversified, including such animals as
alligators, aardvarks, armadillos, venison, boar, kangaroo, moose, chicken, &
turkey. Chili doesn’t traditionally use ground meat, but coarsely chopped meat.
It’s got to have chiles in it, though.
Example recipe:
Texas-Style Chili
2 pounds lean stew beef
8 dried ancho chiles
3 tbsp. oil
2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
2 tsp. ground cumin
2 tsp. oregano
1 tsp. cayenne (ground red pepper)
1 tsp. hot pepper sauce, such as tabasco
1 tsp. salt, or to taste
2 tbsp. flour, if needed
Make a processed mash from the anchos the way I’ve described for preparing
chiles, leaving in as much of the seeds (heat) as you like. Cut the meat into
whatever size you are comfortable with. Heat the oil, brown yer meat. Pour in
the chile mash and reserved cooking liquid (you did remember to reserve the
chile cooking liquid, didn’t you?). Cook for half an hour this way. Add the
garlic, cumin, oregano, cayenne, hott-pepper sauce and salt and simmer for 45
more minutes. The flour is for thickening, in this group I think you know what
flours can & can’t be used (so no whining). You don’t even have to use flour if
it is thick enough, for the last 15 minutes of cooking you can judge how much
liquid will be left and take the lid off and cook it at a higher temperature to
reduce the liquid (it’s called “evaporation”). You can use more salt, you don’t
have to use hot pepper sauce, you don’t have to use cayenne if you are using
other dried chiles that are hotter than the anchos. You can try adding some
tomatos if you like, it’s really not a problem. This is just a basic, Texas
chili recipe. I’m not an expert, I just enjoy eating chili. Ryan Darius Partovi,
his family is in the restaurant business AND they live in Texas (origin of chili
and state’s dish is chili). So he MUST know chili. Don’t bother me anymore about
chiles. I’m not the expert, I just enjoy making them impromptu in my usual
Super-O way (with lots of grass-fed beef or buffalo lard!).
From looking at chilis it looks that chiles are required, beans are not, meat is
certainly traditional as the base (chiles are the second required ingredient).
Anyone who is hip enough to do the food combining knows that sticking to
recipies that are meat only, without the legumes, is not missing out. Eat like
royalty, digest it easily, you’re an O, dammit!
Chilis seem like a good way to cook up any old chopped up animal, be it
kangaroo, alligator, armadillo, miscellaneous roadkill, etc. Even if the animal
doesn’t taste like that sweet, corn-stuffed grade “A” feedlot-tender beef, the
virtue of the chili format is that the herbs, spices and flavorful chiles can
cover whatever strange or unusual meat you happen to be working with. That’s the
beauty of the chili. Okay, say, for example, if I was sick of my meager,
disappointing, boring life as a pharmaceutical courier in Minneapolis, Minnesota
and wanted to get a more lucrative job as a professional mercenary chef for one
of those child armies in war-torn Africa… I would be sure to keep my
transportable pantry well stocked with tomatos, chiles of various sorts and
other chili ingredients. That way when they massacre and butcher all the
innocent people and the opposing army’s soldiers I’ll get my
interpretor/assistant chef to persuade those child soldiers not to just hack of
whatever body parts they want and/or pull out those organs and eat them on the
spot, raw, but, rather, to get them into the habit of taking whatever parts they
enjoy feasting on back to the communal cooking fire. Then I’ll dazzle my
beautiful African children with splendorous chili stews, conveniently masking
the taste of human flesh (I’ve heard we’re quite salty) for myself and any
others who don’t like pork/human.*
Who’s up for some chili?
*travelling armies have been known to soak the hearts in gin before eating, so
they’re not all totally unsophisticated, you know!
Quick quiz: what do tomatos, grapes & kasha (buckwheat) have in common?
Axel O+secretor