TrickJarrett.com

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.

The history of the pizza box

Tonight the wife and I had some pizza for dinner. And as I brought the pizza in, I was reminded of the periodical question I have - how did we get the nearly ubiquitous pizza box design? Where did it come from? Well, turns out Scott Wiener wrote an article about it in 2018, which ranked first in DuckDuckGo when I searched for "origins of the pizza box."

I've been storing my cheese all wrong

"Cheese is alive," said Kyra James, a food educator and certified cheese professional. "And needs oxygen and humidity to stay alive."

Experts across the field agree that cheese paper — that is, opaque paper covered with a thin layer of wax or plastic in varying compositions — is ideal for wrapping everything except fresh cheeses like ricotta, feta and mozzarella (which should stay in their original packaging with their brine). And yes, for cheeses cut in pieces that you buy wrapped in plastic, it's a good idea to re-wrap if you'd like them to last longer.

"You can keep cut wedges of cheese in these papers for literally weeks at a time with very little change to the quality and flavor," Ms. Saxelby wrote. For sustainability and economy, there are now reusable and compostable cheese papers, and you can even reuse the wrapping from the cheese counter after a rinse and dry.

Chicken Cobbler

We tried the viral chicken cobbler recipe for dinner tonight. Overall I thought it was fine. It's pretty heavy. But, as far as meals go. Through the power of modern capitalism, it's a stunningly simple dish for what it turns into.

The best banana pudding recipe

Paula Deen original that has become a favorite.

Italian Wisdom

A tavola non s’invecchia

Translates to:

At the table, one does not grow old

California won a Supreme Court case about humane pig treatment in meat production

Should California be able to require higher welfare standards for farm animals raised in other states if products from those animals are to be sold in California? On May 11, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld California’s position by a 5-4 vote in National Pork Producers Council v. Ross.

While the ruling was fractured and reflected complex legal questions, it is a major victory for those working to improve farm animal welfare. A number of states will undoubtedly take advantage of the power that the Supreme Court has recognized.

You can eat Impossible meat raw, though you may not want to.

I had this idea pop in my head a week or so ago, but kept forgetting to look up the answer. Not that I have any desire whatsoever to do so, just curiosity if something they did somehow made it dangerous to eat raw.

The short answer is yes, you can eat Impossible "meat" without cooking it. The better answer is you probably don't want to.

"Our products were made to be cooked, in order to achieve the best sensory, texture and visual experience," a spokesperson for Impossible Foods told The Takeout via email. "Impossible products should be handled with the same caution as any other raw protein, and it's important to remember that there are always risks to consuming raw or undercooked foods."

Although it's explicitly recommended that people cook Impossible Foods products, the spokesperson also said that chefs have successfully made tartare using Impossible products, following many of the same guidelines set out for serving the best animal-based version.

So, it's not impossible to enjoy this plant-based product in its raw form. It just might not be the best-tasting option, since the product is designed to be enjoyed with a bit of Maillard reaction. If you happen to share the same love of raw protein that my godmother does, maybe a nice Impossible tartare could satisfy your carnivorous cravings; just practice the same common sense you would with any food, and don't leave it sitting out too long.

A look at the origins of "monkey bread"

Like the author, I thought it was a family recipe of some sort. Though I kind of expected there to be a bigger story since no one else in my family seemed to adopt it the same way I did during childhood.

Chef credited with creating Chicken Tikka Masala dies

"Can This Chicken Company Solve America’s Food Waste Problem?"

Inside, large, green bins were filled with surplus food from 450 supermarkets in the region. Soon, a conveyor belt would move them toward a giant metal claw. As the claw lifted each bin, the lid would swing open. Bruised apples, watermelon rinds, unsold hot dogs, and stale bagels would fall into a chute, initiating the process of turning grocery store waste into chicken feed.

Since the first package of Do Good Chicken hit retail shelves in April, the company estimates it has kept 11 million pounds of food out of landfills—and they're just getting started. Two additional facilities are in the works—in Fort Wayne, Indiana and Selma, North Carolina—and Kamine said he plans to eventually build one "in every major metropolitan area."

UW Researchers Debunk Overt Red Meat Health Concerns

In an unprecedented effort, health scientists at the University of Washington scrutinized decades of research on red meat consumption and its links to various health outcomes, introducing a new way to assess health risks in the process. They only found weak evidence that unprocessed red meat consumption is linked to colorectal cancer, breast cancer, type 2 diabetes, and ischemic heart disease, and no link at all between eating red meat and stroke.

Where did Ketchup come from?

I fell down a rabbit hole today about ketchup. Ketchup has been, for much of my life, the only real "condiment" which I use. I'm not big on mayo or mustard. I will eat both in various foods, but generally I don't add them to things like hamburgers, hot dogs, etc. And because of this, I have a t-shirt courtesy of my wife (though I don't often wear it) which says "I put ketchup on my ketchup."

So, you could say ketchup is a big deal for me. But, I realized, I know very little about it's history and why it's so monolithic in what it is, compared to the variety we see in mustard.

This link is an interesting read about the history of it, and looking at where and when it might have become a thing.

"Food expiration dates don't have much science behind them – a food safety researcher explains another way to know what's too old to eat"

It’s logical to believe that date labels are there for safety reasons, since the federal government enforces rules for including nutrition and ingredient information on food labels. Passed in 1938 and continuously modified since, the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act requires food labels to inform consumers of nutrition and ingredients in packaged foods, including the amount of salt, sugar and fat it contains.

The dates on those food packages, however, are not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Rather, they come from food producers. And they may not be based on food safety science.

For example, a food producer may survey consumers in a focus group to pick a “use by” date that is six months after the product was produced because 60% of the focus group no longer liked the taste. Smaller manufacturers of a similar food might play copycat and put the same date on their product.

The article also links to FoodSafety.gov as a website to get actual information on the storage guidelines for some foods.

The secret world beneath our feet is mind-blowing – and the key to our planet’s future

[Auto Generated Summary]:

Bacteria, fungi, plants and soil animals, working unconsciously together, build an immeasurably intricate, endlessly ramifying architecture that, like Dust in a Philip Pullman novel, organises itself spontaneously into coherent worlds. "The idea is to let the plants put back at least as much carbon and minerals as we take out."Tolly tells me that "The green manure ties up nutrients, fixes nitrogen, adds carbon and enhances the diversity of the soil. The more plant species you sow, the more bacteria and fungi you encourage. Every plant has its own associations. Roots are the glue that holds and builds the soil biology."The other crucial innovation is to scatter over the green manure an average of one millimetre a year of chipped and composted wood, produced from his own trees or delivered by a local tree surgeon. As Tolly explains: "It isn't fertiliser; it's an inoculant that stimulates microbes. The carbon in the wood encourages the bacteria and fungi that bring the soil back to life." Tolly believes he's adding enough carbon to help the microbes build the soil, but not so much that they lock up nitrogen, which is what happens if you give them more than they need. If we can discover how to mediate and enhance the relationship between crop plants and bacteria and fungi in a wide range of soils and climates, it should be possible to raise yields while reducing inputs.

For much of my life, salad was not a food I enjoyed. I've always hated lettuce. It was tasteless and it's texture made me gag and I just hated it. I'm not saying it was a reasonable or logical mentality. My wife convinced me to try spinach as an adult and I've found I am fine with it. It doesn't cause revulsion in me the way iceberg lettuce does. I use it in my smoothies and occasionally, like this week, I use it for lunch salads.

Now, I am not thrilled by spinach salad, but it is food. And it is healthy. Over the years my recipe has been purposefully simple and bland: spinach, chicken, almonds, olive oil, some garlic salt (not a lot, and mostly as part of cooking the chicken.)

This week I've added chopped raw bell pepper and I have to say, I quite liked it. I think I probably needed a little more chicken, but overall I was quite happy with this lunch.

I am determined to prioritize weightloss this year and get my health back to where it needs to be. We'll see how successful I am, but if today's salad holds my interest then it is an exciting development as a go-to option for my daily lunches.