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Trick's Chili

With the weather looking like this:

I turn to my favorite cold weather meal prep for the week: chili.

This recipe is something I've been making for probably two decades, and it is an evolution / mixture of ones I've found online and just settled on over the years. I like my chili to be more chewy than soup. In general, I hate drinking calories. My smoothies are thick, and I avoid soup unless it has plenty to chew in it.

All that said, my recipe is dirt simple and almost entirely done in the slow cooker. It's just about knowing the ingredients and throwing them in the pot together, and stirring from time to time.

First, I saute 1 lb. of Italian sausage filling and 1 lb. of ground beef. Do them separately as they brown at different temperatures. I tend to go with the fattier mix of ground beef, but I've also made the chili with ground turkey, so anything works. I will pour in the grease and fat from the sausage, but I drain the fat from the beef before adding to the slow cooker.

In the slow cooker, along with the meat, I add:

• Chili seasoning (usually I use a packet mix for the base, and then I add more heat with other spices I have)
• Liberal hot sauce pouring
• 2x Diced Bell Peppers
• 1x Diced Poblano Pepper
• 1x Diced Onion
• 2-3x Celery Stalkes sliced into half moons
• 2x cans of chili beans (or red/kidney beans)
• 1x can of Rotel diced tomatoes with peppers
• 1x can tomato paste
• 12 oz. can cheap beer

I crank the slow cooker on high and let it do its thing for 4ish hours, then I turn it to low and let it go for another few hours. I'll stir the pot any time I pass through the kitchen, but it's a very forgiving recipe.

Let the turkey cool!

From America's Test Kitchen on social media:

Sunday Baking

Pineapple Banana Bread, fresh from the oven. Letting them cool some before removing from the pans.

PS - I discovered this morning that Good Eats is streaming on Max.

Homemade Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream

I continue my efforts of homemade ice cream. This batch is mint chocolate chip with chopped Andes mints. Pretty good, though I could use a bit more peppermint extract next time.

Sorbet - Take 1

So my first experiment with sorbet, a raspberry sorbet, turned out... okay. It's not amazing. Primarily my issue is that it's definitely more icy than smooth, but that's okay. It was my first try. And it is still edible, I had some with a brownie.

When I was running the maker, I ended up taking advantage of living up north. I put the ice cream maker outside, draped a towel over it, and let it run for two-ish hours. Having it inside was just too much noise; and also I figured outside was a good 30 degrees colder than inside so that would help with freezing the sorbet.

Next up is vanilla ice cream.

My Thanksgiving kitchen plans for the day

1. Bake brownies
2. Start raspberry sorbet in the maker
3. Sweet Potato casserole
4. Mac & Cheese
5. Grill steaks

I had been intending to smoke turkey, but with just my wife and I, we opted for steak. She isn't a big turkey fan.

The rock salt used on driveways is also used in making home ice cream

It makes perfect sense after reading what is going on, but I would have assumed they needed to be different.

Aaron Franklin Smokes a Turkey

Aaron Franklin is a chef and restaurant owner (Franklin Barbecue in Austin TX), he's my go-to Smoking guru for delicious meat.

Beyond Meat - End of Week Thoughts

So this week I made my lunch for the week. An orzo dish that I whip up and eat over the week. Normally I use chicken or Italian sausage and this week I decided to give Beyond Meat Italian Sausage a try. I'd never tried any form of Beyond Meat so I was going in blind. I also bought normal sausage (it was on sale) as a backup, so I was covered either way.

Cooking

I normally boil the sausages on the stove and then finish them as coins in the meal while the orzo boils. Can't do that with Beyond Meat, as I quickly realized. About 60-90 seconds into them heating up in the water I realized the water was getting extremely oily and my brain clicked that their casings wouldn't be meat, so were likely soy or something that was deteriorating in the water. So I pulled them out of the water. The casings felt like some sort of jelly. So I dumped the water and cut the sausages and cooked them in the pan with oil as coins. Cooking was fine, but it also was the first clear sign that this wasn't meat. It left a lot on the pan, more than I would expect from similar sausages. Is it a big deal? Not really, there was still plenty of meat, but was a bit of a pain to clean.

Once I was convinced they were done cooking I decided not to transfer them to the cooking orzo, for the same reasons I didn't boil them to cook them. I didn't want the boiling orzo to ruin the casings and the sausage to disassemble. Once the Orzo was mostly boiled, I added the sausages for the last few minutes of cooking.

Eating

The food was put into a plastic container and refrigerated overnight. The next day I reheated a portion for lunch. The meat reheated fine, and the best part of the Beyond Meat product is the mouth feel. It feels like meat when you bite into it. The sausage was supposed to be "Hot Italian" but it honestly barely registered for me. The flavor was muted, if anything. It didn't have the umami of sausage, but also, it didn't taste like anything else to me. So as a vehicle for other flavors, it works well enough. It held up through the week with no discernible shifts in flavor or texture.

Verdict

Overall, I'm a fan. I am not going to be giving up sausage all together, but in this recipe I think it works and I'll be trying it again when I make it for lunch next time. There's another brand friends recommended, Field Roast. I plan to give them a try next and we'll see.

The truth is I've considered going vegetarian for health and environmental reasons, but... I love meat. Steak is so delicious. Burgers. Sausage. Chicken... I love it all. But if I can begin to cut into the ones I eat and find the suitable replacements, that is exciting. Maybe one day I'll be a Vege-steak-tarian. We'll see.

First Try of Beyond Meat

I'm going to be making my week's lunch tonight, using one of my go-to recipes. It is an adaptation of a one-pot recipe I found that used orzo pasta. I use hot sausage with it, either Andoulli or hot Italian. And tonight I decided to give Beyond Meat's hot Italian sausage a try. I've never tried it in any form, so this will be interesting to try.

Beyond meat is composed of a bunch of things, primarily pea, beans, and brown rice for the protein of it. This page lays out their marketing of what goes into the meat.