Hut, hut, spice! Oh yeah, it's that time of the year again. Everyone is gathered around the TV for the biggest football game of the year: the Super Bowl.
It's the 13th-straight year my favorite team, the Buffalo Bills, have not made the playoffs. Instead of waiting around to watch a football game with two teams I have no interest in, I decided to learn to perfect homemade chili.
I got the basic ingredients for this recipe from allrecipes.com, but the original was a little bit boring. I decided the only thing missing was the marinating of the ground beef. How can you just put plain and boring meat into a saucepan without seasoning it first?
Here are the basic ingredients to make my chili.
French's Worcestershire sauce
Sweet Baby Ray's Barbecue sauce
ground beef
onion
stewed tomatoes
tomato sauce
kidney beans
water
chili powder
garlic powder
salt and pepper
Total time: 30 minutes
The most important direction that you can take away from this recipe is my method for marinating the ground beef.
1. Place about a pound of ground beef into a large mixing bowl. Add enough French's Worcestershire sauce to coat most of the meat. This will help tenderize it.
2. Place 3-4 tbsp of Sweet Baby Ray's honey barbecue sauce in the mixing bowl. Mix the beef around with using your hands until the meat is evenly coated.
3. Chop up 1/2 an onion and mix in with the beef.
4. After you have seasoned your beef, pull it apart so that you can cook it in a frying pan on the stove.
5. Set your stove top to the medium-high setting and place your smaller pieces of beef into the frying pan. While it is cooking, you still have work to do!
6. Get a large saucepan and set it on the stovetop, setting the burner to medium heat. Add one can of stewed tomatoes, one can of tomato sauce and one can of kidney beans to the large saucepan with one-and-a-half cups of water.
7. While the ingredients in the saucepan are being brought to a boil, periodically check on the beef.
8.When the beef is cooked, add it directly into the sauce.
9.As the ingredients in the saucepan keep boiling, add your pinch of chili powder and pinch of garlic powder.
10. Just as you are about to end the boiling add a little bit of salt and pepper.
Nutrition Facts:
Servings per recipe: 4, cal. (cal) 381, Fat, total (g) 15, chol. (mg) 71, sat. fat (g) 6, carb. (g) 35, fiber (g) 9, pro. (g) 32, sodium (mg) 1265, Potassium (mg) 905, calcium (mg) 111, iron (mg) 5, Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet
Serve this with cornbread or my favorite: Tostitos scoops chips.
Hopefully one of these years I will be able to focus on the Bills playing in the Super Bowl rather than my cooking skills. For now, I'll just enjoy creating a dish one ingredient at a time.
Enjoy the game and I'll keep giving you a recipe you can bring home to your mama - from my kitchen to yours.
Email: joseph.konze@ubspectrum.com
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
