Blandina Street

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!