My Very Nearly Award-Winning Chili Recipe, and Other Deep Dark Secrets

If you believe everything you see on random shows on Food Network, practically everyone out there has some sort of top secret chili recipe in their head, which they keep a closely guarded secret: a pot full of meats, veggies, herbs, spices and quite possibly just a little voodoo.  I don’t think I’m doing anything quite that complex when I make chili, but I do have a recipe that I tend to follow.  Last night for Family Home Evening in the singles ward I attend, we were doing a chili cook-off for the activity.  I knew going into this that I was likely to be facing some stiff competition, so I was going to need to be on my game. 

There was just one minor issue with this: I was short on time.  Where I usually allow several hours for my chili to simmer before serving, I had about an hour and a half (give or take a few minutes) between the time that I got off work and the time that I would need to be serving this stuff to a discerning audience, which meant that I would have to take a couple of shortcuts from my usual recipe to ensure that I would actually have something to serve here.  I also have this innate tendency to tinker with the recipe at inopportune times as well, which may have manifest itself a time or two here.  Nonetheless, since I have not yet heard any reports of anyone getting sick after eating the stuff last night, it’s probably safe to go ahead and share the recipe that I used to make this.  After the jump, see what I do to make chili in a blind panic to feed a hungry crowd, complete with gratuitous photos that my siblings can use to nag me about the cleanliness of my kitchen.

How to Tell When Your Holiday Has Overstayed its Welcome

(Note:  This is a crosspost of an item I wrote over at buzz.mn.)

As you might have noticed if you did any shopping yesterday, it’s after-Christmas markdown time at your friendly neighborhood Target store, or whatever other ”great big box full of stuff” store you’ve got nearby.  On the shelves, all the various baubles and trinkets shine and sparkle just as brightly as ever, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they’ve literally gone out of style overnight. In spite of this, the great big “50% OFF” signs tell the tale. The Valentine’s Day stuff is moving in a week from now, and it’s time for the Christmas stuff to hit the road (or the closet as the case may be) for the next nine months. Next door at the recently opened Kohl’s store (which, oddly enough, replaced a Mervyn’s that closed about a year ago,) they’re even more emphatic: 70% off.

In theory, this would be the best time to stock up on assorted paraphanelia in anticipation of Christmases yet to come, but that leaves the problem of storage. Are those tremendous savings really worth filling up the closet for? Sure, if you’ve got a large crawlspace to put the stuff in (as my parents have) this isn’t a big deal, but since I live in an apartment that accumulates an ever increasing amount of clutter over time, this becomes an issue. Besides, it’s not like they won’t make more of the stuff when the next Holiday season rolls around, right? Right? Um…  Better go ahead and stock up, just to make sure.

 

On the other hand, it’s not just the Christmas decorations taking a quick trip to the bargain bin. As you wander the aisles, it seems like anything even remotely festive is getting the big markdown. This is most visible in the candy aisle, where it seems like everyone’s been wrapping their stuff in festive Holiday packaging since roughly five minutes after Dia de los Muertos ended. In many cases (such as the package of chocolate shown above) a few sprigs of holly printed on the package will save you a couple of bucks over the same product in the standard packaging, even though the individually wrapped squares inside are 100% identical. I stocked up on these, but I don’t know why, since I still have these left over from last year’s after-Christmas clearance sale. If I was a food snob I’d call it “vintage” and claim that 2006 was a good year for chocolate, but I’m pretty sure most food snobs wouldn’t bother with this stuff anyway.

 

Finally, we see shelves and shelves of these red “gift” boxes full of generic Chinese merchandise (Now with 50% more lead than the leading brand!) all with the obligatory markdown. Granted, none of this stuff is particularly expensive in the first place, but if you ever wondered if giving this stuff as gifts would make you look cheap when they were at “full” price, seeing all the prices slashed in half a day after Christmas wouldn’t do much to reassure you. Still, there might be a couple of useful items here and there, so it’s worth looking through the pile. You’d probably feel ripped off if someone gave you one of these as a gift (or vice versa,) but buy it yourself and it’s a bargain.

How to Become a Food Snob in Five Easy Steps

As you can see over in my Blogroll, one of the message boards I have listed is chowhound.com.  Although that particular site can be a valuable source of information cooking and food, there’s just one slight problem:  The place is absolutely crawling with food snobs.  To the sites credit, of the websites I read and participate at on a regular basis, the discussion at Chowhound is usually kept far more civil than that found virtually anywhere else I read.  I haven’t ever been able to figure out whether this was the product of dilligent moderation, or the fact that most of the troublemakers on the Internet haven’t ever managed to advance their cooking skills beyond the microwave and the speed dial button on the phone for pizza delivery.  Nonetheless, on a fair number of threads at Chowhound, the snobbery gets so thick there that you’re not sure why you bother with reading the boards there in the first place.  Maybe it’s just because you haven’t got the refined tastes of the usual crowd there, but more often than not, you just haven’t taken the proper steps necessary to fit in.  After the jump, a handy guide to joining the elite ranks of the food snobs in five easy steps.

Stuff for the Bachelor’s Kitchen

Note:  One of the things I intend to do with this blog is to collect some of the posts I make to the assorted message boards I read into one place.  This is one of those posts, which comes from a post made on the Chowhound.com boards.  I will make a post that describes what you’ll find here in a little more detail later on, but I do make something of a hobby out of cooking, and intend to include a fair bit of material related to that on here.

 This thread on chowhound.com asks what cookware a bachelor should equip their kitchen with to prevent starvation, and to possibly impress a lady who might come along.  Since I have a bit of experience with the subject (the cooking part, not the lady impressing part,) I came up with the following list of items that my own kitchen is equipped with.   Note that most of my pans came from a Wolfgang Puck stainless steel set I got for about $100 at Sam’s Club that has thus far served me well.