The Yum Yum Factor

If Betty Draper had an Instant Pot, she probably would have drank less, cooked more and still would have been left with plenty of time and energy to keep her hair on point. Luckily, we can all get ourselves an electric pressure cooker and join the cult although my hair has never looked as good as Betty's. I have been working for a while to adapt my pressure cooker chili into a vegetarian, three bean chili so that I can have a nice, thick chili that has all the same flavours as my meat filled chili. Because there is no evaporation, it is easy to end up with a watery chili that is bland and lacklustre. Then, you must consider the fact that cooking dry beans in the pressure cooker with an acidic ingredient, like tomatoes, can result in unevenly cooked beans that can take up to four times longer to cook. Now, if I have all the time in the world, I am fine with that and just cook for longer with the tomato but this particular recipe was going to be the main dish featured in my u...

I have been having more adventures with my Instant Pot this week - this chili, a tomato based meat sauce for pasta and another chicken and lentil stew. Adapting my recipes to work in the pressure cooker requires a bit of math, a lot of research, a few hail Marys while throwing salt over both shoulders and an Om Shanti Shanti just to make sure my bases are covered, but I am finally starting to get it. I keep reading that pressure cooking is not intuitive cooking and I couldn't agree more so this is the one cooking method that is going to require constant reference to cooking charts until you really get the hang of it, no matter how accomplished you are in the kitchen. Pressure cooking has been a humbling experience but an exciting one at the same time, kind of like my reoccurring dream where I get married to Ryan Gosling. Okay, regarding the half hour chili in the title. If you use canned beans, you could cook it for more like between 15 and 20 minutes at high pressure so y...

The minute I saw this recipe for Rock 'N' Rye Peach Jam , I knew I would make either this recipe or a variation of it as soon as we hit peach season. Once we brought back our delicious Niagara peaches, I kept thinking that the cardamom was screaming ARAK to me and not rye. Only a Canadian will remember using the purple, velvet Crown Royal bag as a pencil case in grade school, but suffice it to say, Rye is as Canadian as it gets. Cardamom, on the other hand, reminds me of the flavours of the Middle East while rye bellows East Coast Canada at 2am on a Saturday after gorging on smores made with a stale Aero bar and the marshmallows that I found in the back of a cupboard in my aunt's trailer. Then I thought that cardamom required an alcohol that comes from the same part of the world and I just happen to have a bottle of Arak that I brought back from Jordan. This Levantine booze is an anise flavoured, colourless alcohol similar to Greece's Ouzo, France'...

It's time to revamp an old recipe using a version of my new beloved blend and extend method but this time I am trying it with ground pork. I am happy to report that it works just as beautifully with ground piggy as it does with ground beef and I am plan to blend and extend all of my ground pork recipes over the winter. This is really just a solid, basic chili recipe using ground pork instead of ground beef and you could totally replace the pork with beef without losing anything. For that matter, you could sub in ground poultry as well. Chili with Pork and Mushrooms 350g ground lean pork 150 g mushrooms of your choice, ground in a food processor until crumbly glug of olive oil 1 onion, finely chopped 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped 1 stalk celery, small dice 2 cups tomato puree 3/4 cup chicken stock (or beer but I didn't have any) 1 540 ml can black beans, drained and rinsed 1 cup tomatillo salsa ( I use the PC brand but use what you have) salt and peppe...

Winter is just around the corner and I find myself craving stuff like chili, stew and soup. Went I came to the blog looking for my chili, I was surprised to find that I didn't have a straight up recipe for my regular chili. I found a great recipe for  Red Chili Pork and Beans , Lentil Chili , and a Chili Chicken Soup  but no simple, meaty chili. I was sure that I had posted it at some point and after a search, I found it on No reEats, the blog that documented my year of never repeating a recipe. To be honest, that year was such a blur of stress and mental anguish, that I think I have blocked most of the meals from my memory in order to protect my fragile psyche.  I made a batch of this stuff over the weekend and realized that I had to share it with you guys because it's too good to keep to myself. This fills my 5 quart heavy pot or my 5 quart crock pot. It freezes beautifully by the way. Chili with Chorizo makes approx 4-5 quarts small glug olive oil 500 ...

You know what I love about cooking vs baking? When you really mess something up while you are baking, you are often screwed, requiring the finished dish to be trashed and you waste all that time, energy and food. That reason, alone, is probably why I am more of a cooker than a baker. Well, that and the fact that I don't have much of a sweet tooth which one look at the tags on this blog will indicate. I am not ashamed to admit that I can be very absent minded. I cut myself a lot, I break glasses all the time and, in fact, we no longer buy nice stemware because I will just break it all. We use these plastic Govino glasses  and Shack only breaks out the real wine glasses when we have guests, allowing those guests to drink out of them. I am allowed to drink out of my little turkish tea glasses and actually prefer to drink my reds Italian style in the heavy, short rock glasses that are also on the approved drinking vessel list. Basically, I am treated like a toddler by own family ...

Whenever I find fresh poblano chilis at the market, I choose to see it as a sign from the cosmos, telling me that I need to make a batch of chili verde STAT. I am not one to ignore such signs but was seriously considering just taking them home to toast and freeze for a later date when I then turned the corner to see that pork shoulders were on sale. At that point it occurred to me that I would bring a pox on my house if I kept walking. It's like the universe wants us to eat more pork. Add to that the fact that I am working on a recipe that would require some sort of pulled pork and two pork roasts were in my cart before you could say Tha-tha-tha-that's all folks! Chili verde, a soupy stew of pork, tomatillos and green chilis, is more Southwestern than straight up Mexican and if we are going to be all hung up on authenticity, we should be using hatch chilis. I have been told, much like Texans refuse to call anything with beans in it chili, the fine people of the south...

It's a rainy day out there and even though it's not actually cold yet, it looks cold out there from inside the house so that's a good enough excuse to make chili. Actually, Saturday is technically the first day of fall so it really is time , isn't it? Tonight we will eat it over baked potatoes with chipotle cream and cheese and then I can send some in The Kid's lunch tomorrow and alleviate my mom sandwich guilt for the week. I am also taking a container of it over to Jen's house ( Piccante Dolce Jen) who is hugely pregnant and due this week so she won't have to cook tonight. So many birds killed with this one chili stone. This is a tasty, basic chili with no fancy surprises or anything. The addition of masa harina at the end thickens it up a bit and since we are eating it over baked potatoes, I wanted a thicker chili as opposed to a soupier chili. It's not spicy either so that it can please all of the people in the house - the chipotle cream a...

It is cold out and if I could, I would eat chili and stew and big hunks of warm bread every single day. I had some okay chili last night at the pub and it made me crave chili but I needed to make a soup, I didn't have any beef or pork to grind up so I had to put my thinking cap on.

This week's lasagna for the  Piccante Dolce Love 4 Lasagna Challenge  was something I wanted to try as soon as i read about this challenge. I will be honest with you, I don't make lasagna often. I don't make rich, cheesy, gooey food much although Shack would love me more if I did. When I make this sort of food, I do really enjoy it once it's out there but it just never occurs to me to make it in the first place, so I really appreciate this challenge. My thighs will not not appreciate this challenge if I am not careful, of course, but it's been fun to make food that is really out of my comfort zone. One of those comfort zones happens to be Mexican food so i knew right away that I was going to try to incorporate those flavours into this challenge. I am sure there is a restaurant chain in there somewhere,  "Paco and Pasquale's"?  Gnocchi a la Veracruz? Carnitas ravioli? One of my favorite stews to make is a green chile verde with pork. I would love to...