Little Kick Chili

Hi all,

In the box this week? Green beans, summer squash and hard squash, tomatoes, onions, and peppers.

Most of the recipes I've posted here are relatively small-batch efforts. However, 'tis the season to stock the freezer and share the bounty of the harvest. So I thought I'd share one larger recipe. Unlike most of what I cook, this one does involve a couple commercial shortcuts (canned tomatoes and garlic). It's a concession to the sheer size of the batch. Those of you scaling it down should assume a 28-ounce can of diced tomatoes is 6-8 medium tomatoes and that each ounce of garlic is half a good-sized head. The recipe makes close to 80 servings and debuted this week, to rave reviews, at the Loaves and Fishes Soup Kitchen here in CoMo.

Little Kick Chili

6 pounds of ground beef, browned and seasoned lightly with salt
6 pounds of ground pork, browned and seasoned lightly with salt
8 pounds of cube steak, browned, lightly salted, and chopped into 1/2" pieces

10 28-ounce cans of diced tomatoes
1.5 8-ounce jars of diced garlic

6 large red bell peppers, chopped and sauteed
6 green bell peppers, chopped and sauteed

8 medium onions

18 tablespoons of chili powder
9 tablespoons of oregano
9 tablespoons of smoked paprika
6 tablespoons of coriander
6 tablespoons of cumin

1 teaspoon of cayenne
2+ teaspoons of salt
1+ teaspoons of black pepper

1 cup of corn starch slurry (4 ounces of corn starch, 3-4 ounces of water, shaken in a half-pint jar)

After preparing the meat, add it to a large restaurant-size stock pot along with the tomatoes, bell peppers, onions, and garlic. Add the herbs and spices in two or three batches, stirring in between to check the heat and flavor. The goal here is a savory chili with just a little kick, nothing that should burn out your mouth or stomach lining. Let it all simmer for at least an hour before adding the slurry to thicken. Allow at least another hour of low heat for the flavors to meld and the corn starch to integrate completely.

Enjoy with 79 of your closest friends or chill and store up against the coming cold.

See you next week!
;-)M