First Variation: 22 September 2012
I
never had to cook much before this day.
As a bachelor, my nourishment either had the word “instant” on the box
or required no preparation whatsoever.
My friends poked fun at my diet - my meals usually consisted of an
orange, rice and green tea or beer.
Eating was a pragmatic exercise, and if I wanted to stray from the
formula, I would just order take-out.
After
I moved in with my wife, I realized that she was the kind of person that took
interest in preparing food, taking this interest so far as to even look up
recipes online and watch the Food Network sober. Long story short, seven years pass and she’s
pregnant, hungry and on doctor-ordered bed rest. And also, we’re poor. After discussing our options (my famous “rice
and oranges” or putting up with my family for the duration of a meal), she
convinced me to try making chili.
I
enjoy chili. I have voted on chili. I have eaten chili in my home. The Wife told me it would be easy. This is not the first time she has deceived
me.
I
owe a lot to a few people I obsessively interviewed on their chili preparation
who schooled me in the art of peeling tomatoes and advising me to use more than
one kind of meat. I owe the most to my
lovely wife, who sat patiently in the kitchen for those first three hours of
cutting vegetables and peeling tomatoes.
Without her tender guidance, I wouldn’t have even realized I had to
brown the meat.
What
follows is my first chili recipe, a chili that will stand up against all my
others as “the worst.” This recipe has
been submitted for educational and nostalgic reasons. It is not something that I would ever make
again. While I succeeded in providing
sustenance to my bed-ridden wife and our unborn child for two days, it would
not win a competition. It’s a chili for
the masses – people that need to eat, but don’t care about taste. It might be a good recipe for an army, but a
shitty army, like the Salvation Army or the cast of a community theatre
production of Shenandoah. But not Civil
War re-enactors. I bet those guys know
their chili.
Ingredients:
½
lb. ground beef
½
lb. hot Italian sausage
6
vine-ripe tomatoes
2
‘green striper’ tomatoes (from the garden of Victor Tocco)
1
yellow tomato (from the garden of Victor Tocco)
1
yellow onion
4
jalapenos
1
“long hot” Italian pepper (from our garden)
2
cherry peppers
1
red bell pepper
1
can of red kidney beans
Spices:
Chili
powder; table salt; pepper; paprika; cayenne pepper
Toppings:
Crispy
smoked bacon bits; Pepper-Jack cheese; chives
Preparation
for a first-time cook deciding to make Chili as your first attempt at cooking
anything:
1)
Dice onions, throw into crock pot. Dice peppers, making sure to remove all seeds
from all varieties because you think, for no apparent reason, that pepper seeds
are poisonous or something. I mean,
you’re supposed to take out the seeds and white shit from the inside of bell
peppers – hot peppers are the same, right?
2)
Cut up your chives. I know you won’t be needing them for a few
hours, but you forgot that they don’t actually go in the crock pot. Next time, cut them after you put the bacon in
the oven.
3)
Peel the tomatoes by “blanching” them. This is done by googling “how to peel a
tomato” and following the instructions.
Basically, you draw an “X” on to the top and bottom of a tomato by just
barely piercing the skin with a knife, then dropping it into boiling water for
10 seconds, removing and dropping it into a bucket of ice water. Then you realize that the amount of time left
in the ice or boiling water may have fucked something up and painstakingly peel
them more like you would an apple.
Occasionally, you can peel the skin right off, but only
occasionally. Dice the tomatoes when the
skin is removed and throw into the crock pot angrily. Make sure you peel about four more tomatoes
than was necessary and remove from the crock pot when you realize that there’s
no way you’re gonna fit any meat or beans in there. Use those tomatoes to make a delicious pasta
sauce. Just put ‘em in an immersion
blender with some garlic and olive oil and it makes it almost okay that you
spent like an extra hour on those pieces of shit.
4)
Brown the meat. Put it in a pan, set the heat to “six”
because your wife tells you to, and make sure you select the proper burner
size, if you have the choice. Take one
of those wooden spoons and poke at the shit ‘til you can’t tell what’s beef and
what’s spicy Italian sausage. When it’s
“brown” (hence the term, “browning”), use a different spoon – one of those
plastic jobs with the holes in it – to sift out the grease and add to your
crock pot.
5)
Add spices to the mix. Chili powder should be added with hesitation
as it seems like you’re adding too much. Table salt is important because someone told
you canned tomatoes have salt added and fresh, obviously, do not. So make sure you add some of that. Just a pinch or so of the other spices might
be enough. Who knows? If you ever make chili again, you’ll know
what to add more of.
6)
Turn the crock pot on “high” because cooking
it on “low” would make dinner at an unreasonable hour.
7)
After 2.5 hours of doing dishes, cleaning the
kitchen and drinking heavily, you’re ready to add the beans, cook bacon and
prepare your toppings. So take your can
of kidney beans and put it in a colander, then rinse with cold water, drain,
and add to your chili.
8)
Cook your bacon. This is done by googling the phrase “how to
cook bacon” and following the instructions.
I found a “recipe” that uses the oven itself, requires little cleanup
and boasts “perfect bacon, every time.”
This is very simple to do. You
take out a cookie sheet (you know, but one that’s more like the bottom half of
a broiling pan with four sides, not a cookie sheet with only one kind of angled
side… just google a picture already) and put foil on the whole thing, then line
up some bacon (smoked, preferably) and put it in the oven. Then you turn the oven on to 400, making sure
you didn’t pre-heat. For some reason
this only works if you put it in a cold oven.
I don’t know why, but it’s awesome.
Then you gotta set your egg timer to “20 minutes.” That’s it.
9)
While the bacon’s cooking, shred your
cheese. This is done with a cheese
shredder and is done similarly to how you make your famous microwave nachos
you’re so proud of. Except instead of
shredding them directly onto the nachos, do it in a bowl.
10)
Ding!
The bacon’s…still not done. Turn
on the oven light and check on them every once in a while until they look
cooked. Sidenote: Where the kitchen used to smell amazing
because of chili, now it smells amazing because of smoked bacon.
11)
Put on an oven mitt and take that bacon pan
out the stove. Take out a plate and
place a paper towel on top of it. Then use
tongs to line up the bacon on the plate and take a second paper towel and put
it on top. For fun, you can make a bacon
and plate sandwich, and put a plate upside down on the top, then flip the bacon
a few times, then notice that there’s still some grease on the bacon and
individually pat each bacon strip down before putting them on a cutting
board. Now dice the bacon, put in a bowl
(near the cheese) and pour your drinks.
12)
Time to eat!
Two scoops in each bowl ought to do it.
Enjoy!
