August 25, 2011: Chili with Beans Recipe

I’ve been doing a lot of canning lately and my husband suggested that I try my hand at canning some more substantial food items, like chili. I don’t have any cans of chili in my cupboard so this seemed like an ideal time to make up a big batch that we could eat for dinner one night, then can the rest for later.

My dad is the “Chili King” as far as I’m concerned so I took a few hints from his recipe and created this one.

Chili with Beans

½ pound dry pinto beans

1 t. salt

1 pound ground beef

½ onion, diced

2 cloves garlic, minced

½ red bell pepper, diced

10 roasted, peeled tomatoes

1 15 ounce can kidney beans, drained

1/3 cup red chili powder

2 t. oregano

2 t. cumin
1 t. garlic salt

1 t. black pepper

Several shakes of Tabasco sauce

Sort and wash the pinto beans. Place them in a crock pot, cover with water and soak overnight. The next morning, drain the water and add enough fresh water to cover the beans by about an inch. Heat the crock pot to high, add the salt, and let the beans cook by themselves until almost soft, about 3 hours.

Meanwhile, brown the ground beef with onion, garlic and red bell pepper. Drain the fat and add to the beans. Roast and peel the tomatoes as instructed in my Miscellaneous Kitchen Tips post. Crush them with your hands, discarding the tough core, over the crock pot and add the crushed tomato pieces to the mixture. Add remaining ingredients, except Tabasco sauce (it will make the beans tough) and let cook for another 3 to 4 hours, until pinto beans are completely soft. Sprinkle with Tabasco sauce to taste. Serve with Southwestern Cornbread and a simple tossed salad for a complete, hearty meal.

Tip: If you need to head off to work in the morning and can't add the ground beef mixture later, toss all the ingredients in the crock pot at the same time and let it cook all day while you're gone.

August 20, 2011: Short Ribs in Molé Sauce Recipe

Okay, I have to admit it – I watch the Food Network and shows about food (absolutely anything with Gordon Ramsey) in order to get new ideas for dishes I make. Sure I’m pretty good at putting ingredients together but sometimes even I need a little something to stir my creative juices.

Such is the case with the following recipe. I watched the finale of Master Chef Tuesday night and Adrien made a similar dish. It sounded really good so I pulled out my The Spicy Food Lover’s Bible cookbook to get a general idea of how to make the molé sauce and went from there. I made some pretty big changes but I think it came out really tasty. Try it and tell me what you think!

Pork Short Ribs in Molé Sauce

2 pounds pork short ribs

1 T. vegetable oil

Heat a slow cooker to high. Add the oil and the ribs. Brown on both sides (or use a saucepan on the stove if your slow cooker doesn’t have a high enough temperature).

My mortar and pestle (it has a puppy face on the front!) made out of volcanic rock from Mexico.

Molé Sauce

1 T. Especias Mixtas (this is a Mexican spice blend that contains mustard seed, cumin seed, black peppercorns, coriander seeds, cloves, allspice, bay leaves and dried red chiles)

1 T. sesame seeds

2 T. roasted pumpkin seeds

½ t. cinnamon

2 cloves garlic

½ medium-sized white or yellow onion

1 ounce unsweetened chocolate

2 T. craisins

¼ cup hot red chile powder

2 canned chiles in adobo sauce + 1 t. adobo sauce

1 (14.5 ouce) tomatoes with green chiles

1/3 cup chicken stock

1 bay leaf

Combine the Especias Mixtas, sesame seeds, and pumpkins seeds in a mortar or spice grinder; crush into a coarse powder. Add this to the bowl of a food processor and process by itself, if necessary, to break up any remaining large chunks. Add the cinnamon, garlic, onion, and chocolate and process until crumbled. Add the chile powder, adobo chiles, adobo sauce, tomatoes, and chicken stock. Process until fairly smooth. Pass through a sieve, if desired, for a smoother sauce.

Pour half the sauce over the ribs in the slow cooker and add the bay leaf. Cook on low to medium-low heat for six hours, until pork is tender.

Serves 3 – 4

Tip: Use the leftover molé sauce to make enchiladas, thinning with a bit of chicken stock, if necessary.

July 16, 2011: Garden Recipes

A few weeks ago I shared with you my recipe for a natural insecticide to use on your garden vegetables. I had some difficulty with the formula and/or the spray bottles; for some reason the spray bottles I used (there were two of them) refused to work after a couple times. I’m still not sure if the problem was the liquid I put into them or the bottles themselves.

In search of a new recipe to combat the grasshoppers which are getting fat and happy on my peas and corn and beans, I decided to try sprinkling a bit of hot red chile powder directly on the plants. Voila! This has worked exceptionally well and it’s a very economical solution.

If you can’t find red chile powder, which is dried red chile pods ground up into a fine powder, in your locale, try using whatever is available in your local market. Asian chilis are even hotter and if you can find them at a good price, you could pop them into the blender and sprinkle that over your veggie plants.

With a dismal start to our garden, we decided to go a more conventional route than sprouting seeds and stopped at a nursery just down the street from our house, Sweet Corn Organic Nursery. There we picked up several different types of tomato plants, fennel, lemon balm and lemon basil. We opted to go with a container garden rather than plant them in our garden plot, which needs a lot of help (we’re striving for having the soil ready for next year’s garden).

While we were at Sweet Corn, we talked at some length with the young man tending the nursery. He was the one who let us know it was grasshoppers having a buffet with our vegetable plants. He also said a lot of his customers spray a mixture of water and dishwashing liquid (dish soap) on their plants and have had a lot of success with that. From my experience, that is a great formula for getting rid of those little white flies that like roses and other plants.

So there you go – two new recipes for natural insecticides. After all, why go the bother of planting your own garden only to taint the vegetables with a commercial poison?

Good luck and good eating!