Cooking With G: Chilli Cookoff

I've been threatening for a while to do a cooking segment, and the time has finally come. This afternoon I bought my ingredients, cleaned my kitchen, and got to cooking. Today, as this is the first time, we are going to do something pretty easy, but still one of my favourites: Chilli! Before we get down to that though I think I should adress the first two rules of cooking.

1: tomatoes and any vegetable make an acceptable pasta sauce
2: Add the right spice/herb to that sauce and it is now any cuisine you care to mention!

Here are some herbs & spices I use the most.



From left too right we have: Mixed Herbs (make things italian), Chilli and Paprika (make things mexican), Garam Masala and Cumin (make things curry). Learn these and they will serve you well, and most importantly just experiment with them and all the other spices. Go crazy. If it doesn't taste great you know for next time.

Anyway here are the ingredients for today:



in no particular order 1 Onion, 2 Chillies, some garlic, peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, 500g of beef, kidney beans, other beans, paprika, chilli powder. I will also tell you here the dark secret of chilli: the only ingredients you really need are chilli, beans and paprika. Everything else is extra so just pick and choose as you want, the recipe today though is G's Chilli so all of the above are needed. I usually go for Kidney beans and Pinto beans, they didn't have any pinto beans though so I got mixed beans. It really doesn't matter too much.

We'll start up by chopping these:



It's worthing having a bowl for putting the chopped vegetables in, like I've done with the onion here



With the onion done we can move onto the chillies. For educational purposes I've split one open



You see the seed body? That's where all the hotness is. Get rid of some or all of the seed body to make your chilli a bit cooler. I usually get rid of a lot of it because I'm a spice pansy.

WARNING: DON'T TOUCH YOUR EYES YOUR NOSE OR ANYTHING RIGHT AFTER HANDLING CHILLIES.

Anyway once you've sorted your seeds out, chop that shit up and put it with the onion. Also at this point put some oil in a saucepan and start heating it up. You'll want the oven on a medium heat for most of this.

Next thing to deal with is the garlic. There is a great bit in goodfellas where the Don is cutting up garlic with a razor to get it as fine as possible. This is a bit OTT but the principle is sound: the more flavour you want the finer you should cut things, because it increases the surface area in the pot and on your tongue. I chop most stuff pretty fine but again this is up to you really.



Split your garlic into two piles, the first goes with the chilli and the onions. The second goes in your now hot oil.



Once the garlic starts to show signs of browning mix your meat in and IMMEDIATELY add paprika, chilli powder, pepper etc.



Once the meat starts to show signs of browning add in the chillies, onions and the rest of the garlic.



Stir it occaisionally to make sure it doesn't burn and chop the rest of the vegetables. I'm not showing you photos of this. You should know how to chop fucking vegetables. Once the meat has gone brown put your beans in



and thoroughly mix them in, and then add the peppers and mushrooms.



Erm I probably need a bigger pot...



Salvation!

Let all this cook for a bit until the peppers and mushrooms have softened up a bit and then its time for the tomatoes. These don't need to be finely chopped because their entire point is to boil down to nothing.



Once the tomatoes are in put a lid on and leave to simmer for a while on a low heat (I guess about 15 minutes should do it? I wasn't timing it, I never time things. It's why I can't bake)



Every now and then you'll want to stir and taste it. Add more paprika and chilli powder if it needs it. It probably needs more paprika because that shit is delicious.



It reduced down enough that it could all go in one pot. Looks good! (No seriously it does trust me). If it's not looking this gloopy just add more tomatoes and let it simmer a bit longer.

Now it's ready to eat! Have it in burritos! eat it with rice! Stick it in a taco! It's all good. I just slopped some on a tortilla and ate that.



It was amazing.

I bagged up and froze most the rest and probably have enough for about 5 meals which is awesome when you are poor like me. Also if you are a vegetarian just put in more beans to replace the meat, don't use fake meat because that stuff is gross and tastes weird. I will be going vegetarian in a couple of months (I will explain that closer to the time) and I will probably make some them.

Thanks for reading!