Culinary Question of the Month

With December all upon us, it's natural to think to the holiday season.  For me, that often means baking... particularly cookies.  So, I ask you: What cookie, if any, do you absolutely want to make this year and why?

Simple Chili

Background
The great state of California seems to have two seasons: dry and wet.  Wet tends to roll around this time of year and, without fail, always makes me want to curl up at night with something warm to eat. One of my go-to dishes, incidentally also very good on oh-so-frigid Wisconsin nights, is chili.  You can go out and find a plethora of variants on this dish, but I find that having a simple recipe down is best.  Once you have that, elaborate as you wish.  What follows is my basic chili recipe for lazy, chilly nights.


Ingredients
1 lb. ground turkey
1 14 oz. can diced tomatoes
1 14 oz. can kidney beans
1 C. frozen corn
1 green pepper, diced
1 pkg store-bought chili seasoning
-OR-
Homemade seasoning (mine is Penzey's Arizona Dreamin', salt, smoked paprika, cumin and a thickener like corn starch or flour)


Directions
In a large sauce pan, brown the turkey.  The particular pans I use do not require lubrication to do this, but you know your cookware.  If you usually need oil to prevent sticking, please apply.  If I am going to allow my chili to cook for several hours (i.e. by some miracle, I harnessed forethought that day), I brown lightly.  If it's an hour before dinner and I'm summoning the energy to even get off my butt, I brown more thoroughly.  No one wants undercooked meat.

Hello Turkey

If your turkey creates grease, you can drain it and return the meat to the same pot (mine typically produces little enough that I skip this step).  Pour in the tomatoes, kidney beans (juice and all), and corn.

Wait, green peppers?

Mumble an expletive to yourself as you run to the fridge for your forgotten green pepper.  Dice and add to pot.  Note: some people like a nice, big bite of pepper, others prefer it to add color, but never be the main player in any given spoonful of chili.  Dice according to your preference.  Add the seasoning and let the whole pot simmer over medium-low heat until you hear your husband pedal up the driveway and request you open the garage.

Mmmm...incorporatey

Notes
As I said, this is a basic recipe and it can easily be changed, thusly:

1. One change we make quite often is omitting the meat.  In this case, I tend to add a second kind of bean or sometimes a grain, like quinoa or couscous.   More veggies is another popular option around here.  Diced or pearl onions, zucchini, and even spinach have been big players in the past.

2. Don't feel married to the kidney bean.  I know, I know, leaving out the kidney is probably somehow blasphemous to the real world of chili (though I seem to remember reading somewhere that beans weren't in "real chili"), but I just don't see it.  We often use black beans instead of, or in addition to kidneys.  And if I'm doing a chicken chili, I will use cannellini (great northern or navy) beans.

3. I've said it before, but I'll say it again: always play with spice.  You know what you like - or what your guests like.  Don't feel constrained by what a store will sell you.  Sometimes I'm in a more cuminy mood, so I toss a bunch of that in.  If I'm cooking primarily for my husband, I'll kick up the heat factor with some red pepper, or his cherished 'rooster sauce'.  And please, if you stumble upon an unbelievable combination, write it down.  You'll think you'll remember.  You won't.

Life of Kitchen

Sometimes at icanstandtheheat, things happen.  For example, one might buy a house whose kitchen is sold looking like this:

[Of particular note are the unfinished counter tops (including, though not overly evident here, lack of grout between the 12" tiles used), lack of appliances, dirt, grime, and grease on existing appliances, and just peeking in at the top of the photo: a giant, 1980's style florescent lighting fixture.  What you can't see?  The abundant mold growth in and around the sink due to improper installation, and the fact that the ceiling was dropped a full foot.  We still don't know why.  The flooring rode that fine line between not being pastel laminate tiles and being high enough quality laminate wood to actually come clean every now and then.]

Therefore, when one has climbed out of the debt of buying the house and saved enough money to redo the kitchen, one then must wait many weeks to eventually, and blissfully, arrive at this:

[Take a  moment; I do every time I walk in.  Solid counter tops, tiled floors, new, functional appliances, ceiling raised back up for extra storage.  See that little window up to the left of the range?  That was covered by cabinets before.  The lighting, you ask?  Recessed, LED on a dimmer and two new pendants for character.  And the mold?  Eradicated with extreme prejudice.  The properly installed sink should keep it at bay.  Happy. Joy. Time to cook!]

...

Except that sometimes at icanstandtheheat, other things happen sort of concurrently with the first things and one now spends a good amount of time here (typically sans cat):

And here:

Because one now looks like this:

That's right, we at icanstandtheheat anticipate the arrival of our first child in March.  And we have discovered that pregnancy, on top of a chronic pain condition, can be, well, a bit draining!  But fear not, we haven't given up.  In fact, we have a bit of a backlog of recipes and cooking experiences to upload that we promise to get to in the very near future.  So, to anyone who happens to still be reading, please stay tuned!

Making Sausage

Bad blogger.  Bad, bad, bad blogger!  A 7-month-hiatus can't possibly increase readership, so I will apologize to you and get back to it: I'm sorry.  Here's a video about making sausage...

If you're reading this, you either want text instead of a video, or you clicked on the video, started watching and then exclaimed, "oh for the love of... this thing is 11 minutes long!"  Yeah, sorry about that.  It was a fun process and I got a little too giddy trying to make it all fit together.  Here is a written version.


Ingredients
5 lb. pork shoulder (also called butt or Boston butt)
3/4 lb. beefsteak (or really any cut of non-tendony beef - we used ground, actually)
garlic, minced
nutmeg (ew)
salt
pepper
fennel (optional)
red pepper flakes (optional)
pig intestines/casings (if making links)


Directions
The first thing you want to do is rinse and soak your intestine casings.  Yeah, it's gross, but you're making sausage.  The casings are going to come in a package in a sort of salty brine and so you want to rinse them and start to rehydrate.  Let them sit in a small bowl with an end sticking out - this way it will be easier to grab later.

Now that you have pig intestines sitting in a bowl on your counter (everyone's life ambition, right?), you can start preparing your meat.  Both cuts should be diced into 1-2" pieces.  Do not worry about exact size or uniformity; these are getting ground up.  Do keep them in separate bowls for now, though, and place them near your meat grinder (oh yeah, you need one of those).  You'll also want your minced garlic nearby - we started with a few minced cloves.

With either the fine or coarse cut disc in your grinder, start loading in meat and grind away!  You want a ratio of 3 parts pork to 1 part beef as you do this, adding in pinches of garlic here and there.  And don't forget a large bowl to catch all your ground yumminess.  When you get to the end, it will likely be difficult for your grinder to grasp the remaining chunks of meat and pull them through.  Never fear, simply take some of your ground product and put it back through.

*Please use caution while grinding - we want this to be made of pork and beef, NOT human fingers!*

When the meat is ground, it is time for what my family calls, The Argument Phase.  This is when you season - what you season with will be the result of who argues the most efficiently.  Garlic, salt and pepper are always a good start and we (not me, actually, but the rest of my family) like to put in some nutmeg.  Other popular ingredients include fennel seeds and red pepper (the latter for a hot Italian sausage).  Again, feel free to argue for whatever you want.  My brother, for example, argued quite vehemently for thyme.

When you believe you've seasoned well - take a chunk out of your bowl, flatten it and fry it up in a little pan with some oil.  Have everyone taste and then debate about what is missing.  We suggest seasoning lightly to begin with.  It's far easier to add more garlic or pepper than it is to add more meat!

If you are just making sausage to have ground sausage, you are done when the seasoning argument is complete.  You may cook immediately or freeze in chunks, blocks, cylinders, stars, infinity symbols, etc.  If you want a traditional string of sausage links, though, you must now case the ground meat.

You will use the same meat grinder, this time removing the cutting disc and putting the "casing funnely thing," as my brother calls it, on instead. Find the end of one of your casings and gently coax it open and over the tip of the instrument.  Then continue to thread the entire casing on - using a little of the water it's been soaking in to keep the casing and the "funnely thing".  Leave a little bit of the end of your casing unthreaded as you will need to tie off the end of the sausage link once it's filled.  Now, grind away!

You'll see the meat beginning to come out of the funnel and into the casing and will want someone standing at the end to support it.  That person can coax the product into a nice spiral as it continues to come out of the grinder.  When the whole casing is filled (also leaving a bit of the other end empty for making a knot), tie each end to prevent sausage leakage.  Then, at 6 inches or so, twist the casing a couple of times to make one link.  After the next 6 inches, twist the other way, and so on until you've reached the other end.

Ahhhhhh!  My casing broke!  Yeah, it'll do that.  If so, you can cut the long rope of sausages there and tie off each end.  It's not as long a finished product, but they still work as sausage.

I may have left something out.  If so, please let me know in the comment section below!