And speaking of Texas, today's Cooking Palooza will feature Chili Pepper Madness's Texas Chili Recipe.
Mind you, because my daughter and I are still participating in the Lenten season Whole30 regime -- 11 days left!!! Woohoo!!! -- I'll be having to eliminate the non-compliant ingredients, such as the masa harina and brown sugar. I'll be using beef stock instead of dark beer
And instead of Worcestershire sauce I'll be using a miscegenation from a recipe (that shall remain nameless) for Whole30-compliant Worcestershire sauce. (Who knows? Maybe I used too many anchovy filets, as it was hard to get those suckers out of the jar in one piece.)
Anyhow, I was first going to attack Mount Dishmore before attempting this project. But when I read the recipe again, and saw that there is soaking time involved, I got a bit sidetracked from tackling the dishes from yesterday's cooking fest.
The recipe calls for three types of dried peppers -- ancho, pasilla, and New Mexico. I got these nifty buggers from Food Town, which is just two minutes from my house.
The pasilla peppers are a lot longer once I get them out of the bag. And each type of pepper has its own interesting characteristic.
The recipe called for lightly toasting -- and the key word is "lightly" -- in a dry skillet for about a minute or two per side.
Well, I did not read the instructions as carefully as I should have, as I missed the "a minute or..." part. So after two minutes they looked something like this.
Oops! I don't think they were supposed to be this black! (Crossing my fingers this still works out.)
Next came the part where I let them cool before removing the seeds and stems and sticking them in a bowl. (Dang! Those ancho peppers are sure sticky inside!)
Now that the peppers are soaking,
it's time to attack and conquer Mount Dishmore.
OK. The dishes are done. Now let's move on to dirtying up some more dishes.
Anyhow, I wound up remaking the chili paste as I did not care for the scorched taste of the initial batch. As with a lot of things, sometimes you have to start over.
Compared to the old scorched pepper paste, this new batch looked, and tasted, much better.
The protein star of the show is this nice Black Angus chuck roast, which gets cut up into small, bite-size pieces.
Of course whenever I engage in any cooking palooza, there's always at least one dog nearby.
Once the meat is cut up, it gets coated with powdered cumin, salt, and black pepper.
Next comes cutting up more veggies. Looking at these Nitrile gloves, can you guess which veggies will be included in the cutting up?
Here are the cut-up veggies: sweet onion, jalapenos, serranos, and garlic.
By the way, this is the "suggested" four cloves of garlic.
And this culinary miscegenation is the Whole30 approved "What's-This-Here-Sauce?' -- Worcestershire Sauce.
First step is to brown the meat in some olive oil in a big pot.
Once the meat is nicely browned, scoop it out and set it aside.
Then saute the onion and peppers for about five minutes.
Next add the garlic and saute for another minute longer.
Once all that is nicely cooked, add that chili pepper paste that's been sitting patiently.
Mix it up.
Then stir in the beef broth and all the rest of the goodies. And since the recipe did not specify when to add the beef that's been scooped out, I guess this would be a good point to include the beef.
Bring the sucker to a boil, and then reduce the heat to a simmer. Let it simmer for a couple of hours (or as long as it would take to make the meat tender).
While the Texas Chili was simmering away, I decided to roast some butternut squash with olive oil, garlic, salt, and black pepper.
Dang! That squash tasted good! I couldn't stop from nibbling at it!
Anyhow, that squash got paired with the Texas Chili, and what a delightful taste combination that was!
As an afterthought, my daughter made a comment about my cooking up cold weather foods as our temps have been warming up. Yeah, I am a bit weird that way, at times.
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