Super Bowl -- Emily's Chicken Chili

It was a small, intimate, Super Bowl gathering, and chili seemed appropriate. Emily had served this when I visited Minnesota a bunch of years ago, and I came home with the recipe, and that recipe's been in my binder all that time, and hadn't made it ot prime time even once. Super bowl is the right occasion.

This did require some attention over the couple of hours it took to make, but not too much. The problem with the Super Bowl, of course, is whether to get up and stir/add things during the game itself or the commercials. I opted for the game....if anything good happens they always have the replays. And the game (usually) is in longer chunks. That worked out well!

The chicken makes this chili a little lighter than a usual chili, but the flavor was great. The pimenton added a nice smoky taste -- I'd have used the Chimayo chili powder that Susan and I brought back from New Mexico, but I think it's all at her place. And the replacement of the green peppers with cabbage was based on a food aversion. I don't expect that cabbage is very traditional Mexican, but the texture and heft of cabbage isn't that different from green pepper. The taste may be a little stronger, but with all the flavor in the chili, it pretty much blends into the background.

Emily's Chicken Chili

3 T Butter, divided
2 C chopped onions
3 garlic cloves, large
1 jalapeno pepper, large, seeded and chopped
2 TBSP Chili powder (more to taste) I added a TBSP of pimenton...mmmmmm
4 tsp cumin
2 tsp oregano
1 tsp coriander
1 tsp cinnamon
2 C condensed chicken broth (I used some chicken broth base with water)
1 28 oz can tomatoes, not drained -- I used fire roasted, diced
1 16 oz can garbanzo beans, rinsed and drained -- I used black beans
1.5 C green pepper, chopped. I used red cabbage.
3 C chicken meat, chopped
1 oz unsweetened chocolate (Bakers), chopped
salt and tabasco sauce, to taste
corn tortillas
cheese (Monterrey Jack, or something similar), grated
sour cream
cilantro

Melt 1.5 T of the butter in dutch oven.
Saute onion and garlic until onions are translucent -- 10 min or so
Stir in jalapeno, chili powder, cumin, oregano, coriander, cinnamon, broth, tomatoes
Bring to a boil
Reduce heat, simmer, covered, one hour, stirring occasionally
Add beans, simmer uncovered 30 minutes. Stir frequently.
Meanwhile, in frying pan, melt 1.5 TBSP butter and saute green peppers (cabbage!) until tender, about 5 min.
Add peppers chicken, chocolate, salt, tabasco.
Continue cooking until chicken is done -- 10 minutes or so.

To serve, line a big soup bowl with tortilla, add chili, garnish with sour cream, cheese, cilantro. I cut the tortillas into bite size pieces.

Weeknight cuisine in a flash - Part 2 - Warm Slaw

Once I got that red cabbage going last night, I was in the mood for more. I had seen a bunch of recipes using red cabbage in a slaw, with all sorts of interesting dressings, some Asian inspired. Sounded good -- I was set. But when I got home, it was COLD...and I wasn't going to munch on cold cabbage. So I thought, why not warm it up a bit. Just a light saute, heat it through, done.

So I took that pile of ingredients you see up there: red cabbage on a rough chop, cilantro, ginger, carrot, little bit of jalapeno, and dumped it all in at once to a heated skillet with a little olive oil, and sauteed just for a couple of minutes, till the veggies brightened and were warm...barely starting to wilt. A pinch of salt, some sesame oil and rice wine vinegar, and I had a tasty side dish to go with the leftover steak and couscous.

Veggies and some meat

Josh and Ruth came for dinner on Saturday night, which was an opportunity to try the something old, something new idea. Josh is a big meat eater, and loves steak, so I got some flanksteak. He also loves tomatoes, but tomato season is just about done. I did, however, have that box of tomatoes I wrote about the other day, so there was some tomato roasting in the plan. Bittman had written about a faster no knead bread, which was worth a try. And I wanted to get a veggie main dish in there.

First, the bread. I have to say, it was a disappointment. Not that it was BAD, mind you, but just boring and not WOW, the way the original no-knead bread is. The idea is you slop it together, let it rise about four hours, pull it out, turn it over a couple of times, let it rest about 15 minutes, and then plop it into the preheated vessel (I like a ceramic casserole dish that gives a nice round shape). The idea is to try to do in four hours what we were doing in 12-18 hours before. No. Not gonna work. The result was a tight crumb, and a flavor that wasn't very interesting. It was OK the next day as toast, but I really don't think I'm going to try this again. I will say this though. Bittman's recipe uses white flour, and I like whole wheat. My versions of the original no-knead are typically half white/half whole-wheat, and it comes out great. I did the same thing here, and was not happy; perhaps all-white will be better? I may try someday.

The tomatoes were great...as good as the first time, which predates this blog. The recipe was taken from Orangette's blog, and definitely needed a reprise performance while tomatoes were still around. It was as wonderful as the first time....tomatoes, garlic, parsley, olive oil. Hard to beat. And they keep for days in the fridge. They're best eaten at room temperature, but what I discovered this time was that you can pop them in the microwave and warm them up a bit beyond room temperature -- somewhere between tepid and hot, and they are marvelous -- even without goat cheese. Just spooned onto some toasted hearty bread, with lots of the flavor infused olive oil. Ah...the memories!

The main course was the veggies. I had a nice bunch of Kale that Ruth was kind enough to chop for me. And a quarter head of cabbage which I chopped. Some onions. Carrot, julienned. Garlic. That's about it. The onions and garlic browned up nicely in the cast iron skillet, after which I put in the huge pile of leaves which cooked down pretty quickly to a manageable size. I think I added some pimenton. It was a nice sweet dish. The cabbage and the kale had two shades of green, and a sweet flavor.


And then there was the flank steak. Nothing too elaborate there. Josh took charge of seasoning, which was Penzey's Turkish Seasoning -- salt, garlic cumin, Telicherry black pepper, Turkish oregeno, paprika, sumac, cayenne, cilantro. On the grill, cooked perhaps a minute or two too long to medium, not medium rate and sliced on the bias. All served over brown rice.

Theme and variations

Sometimes, it's just a matter of what you have lying around. And how much energy you have. I had little energy for real cooking tonight, but didn't have a whole lot the would have made an acceptable instant dinner. I'd had a big lunch, and didn't want much anyway. But a peanut butter sandwich wasn't going to cut it.

There was this head of green cabbage sitting in the fridge, patiently awaiting the call from the bullpen. And a new utility player I'd just acquired, waiting in the dugout for an opportunity to be tried out. I'd been playing around with the idea of cabbage and tempeh stir fry, but I really didn't want to "cook". But chopping up some cabbage into a cole slaw....I could handle that.

It's just been this summer that I realized that I could play around with cole slaw. I'd been making it the way that Bertel taught me: cabbage and carrots, grated very fine; olive oil and white vinegar; dill -- fresh if you have it; salt and pepper; scallions (but I'd been leaving those out for years due to family preferences); and the secret ingredient -- sugar...just a little. Over the years, Eleanor had been put in charge of getting the proportions for the cole slaw just right.

But lately, I've been doing some experimentation. Parsley instead of dill. Some creamy dressings from the bottles in the fridge instead of the vinaigrette. Some of these variations work with roughly chopped cabbage rather than the finely grated cabbage -- finely grated is critical for the vinaigrette version...somehow it just doesn't taste or feel right unless the cabbage is fine.

So, for tonight, a combination of things I might not have thought about putting together before:

Cabbage, roughly chopped
Carrot, grated
Green zebra tomatoes, chopped
Jalapeno peppers, a few, chopped
Olive Oil
Thai fish sauce.

I'd bought the fish sauce a few weeks ago, but hadn't ever used it. It was a bit salty, but overall, the taste was nice. Together with the last leftover chicken leg from the freezer and a warmed up Lamajeun from Eastern Lamajeun Bakery in Belmont, it was a meal.