Slow-cooked dutch oven beef chili

This beef chili of mine is really good if you are willing to slow-cook it for about 2.5 hours, with a total cooking time of about 3 hours.

The ingredients are:

• 1 cup dried kidney beans: the most economical, but you could use about 3 cups of drained canned beans
• 700-800g stew beef
• 1 L jar of tomatoes (I used my home-canned tomatoes; a similarly-sized can of diced tomatoes would work)
• 1 L beef stock/broth
• 2 tbsp. olive oil
• 1 head of garlic
• 3 small or 2 medium onions
• 2 heaped tsp. cumin
• 2 semi-heaped tsp. smoked paprika (sweet)
• 1 semi-heaped tsp. ground cayenne pepper
• 1 heaped tsp. ground chipotle pepper
• 1 heaped tsp. cocoa powder
• 1 tsp. oregano (or some other Italian-like seasoning)
• 2 tbsp. tomato paste
• 1/3 cup flour
• salt
• pepper
• malt vinegar

About 12 hours before you plan to start (i.e. the night before), rinse the dried kidney beans and soak them in a covered bowl in about 3 cups of cold water.

When you are ready to start cooking, pre-heat the oven to 300F and get a dutch oven ready (the pot I used above was a 4.2 qt. Emile Henry Flame Top).

First, season the flour with a bit of salt and pepper and put it in a bowl, cut up the beef so that the pieces aren't more than about 1-inch cubes, rolling the pieces of beef in the seasoned flour as you go.

Then, dice the onions and chop the garlic. Heat the olive oil in the dutch oven over medium heat and add the onion and garlic. Cook, stirring occasionally, for about 5 minutes.

While that's doing, mix the spices (including cocoa powder) into a small bowl. After the 5 minutes is up, add the spices to the onions and garlic, combine well, and cook for about 1 minute.

Then, add the jar of tomatoes. Stir to combine, and then add the beef stock and the tomato paste. Combine well, add the meat and stir briefly. Then, raise the heat, and wait for everything to come to a simmer.

When it reaches a simmer, put the lid on the dutch oven and transfer it to the oven.

The total oven-cooking time will be 2 hours 30 minutes. But, after 1 hour of the oven-cooking time has passed, and only if you are using dried rather than canned beans, drain and add the pre-soaked kidney beans to the pot. Stir to combine, and return it to the oven for the remaining 1 hour 30 minutes.

If you're using canned beans, you can add them at the end of the cooking time (i.e. after 2 hours 30 minutes in the oven). But, definitely do not do this if you are using dried beans because kidney beans are poisonous if not cooked properly (canned beans are pre-cooked).

After the cooking time is up (you can verify doneness by confirming that the meat is very tender and flakes well when put under pressure), give it a stir, and stir in malt vinegar, salt, and pepper to bring the seasoning up to your own taste preference (balsamic vinegar might substitute for malt -- but it is a bit sweeter). The vinegar just adds a tanginess that I normally find missing.

Then, let it sit covered in the pot for about 30 minutes to let it cool and the flavours combine.

Not browning the meat in this recipe is intentional, even though most braising books tell you to do it. If you want to be all French, I suppose there's no harm, but it doesn't add anything in my opinion.

This isn't as thick as some chilis, but it probably has fewer carbs than those and won't leave you feeling over-stuffed after eating a bowl. It will thicken a little bit as it cools.

Beef stew in the Emile Henry Flametop dutch oven

I got a very nice dutch oven for Christmas -- the rather new Emile Henry Flame.

This is a round, glazed, clay dutch oven that has additives to the clay that make it tolerant of temperature shocks -- so much so that you can start a dish on the stovetop and transfer it to the oven, which is not typical for clay pots. My other clay pot -- the Schlemmertopf -- is so intolerant of heat shocks that you always start cooking it from a cold oven without pre-heating. This isn't anything against the Schlemmertopf because it's a very nice pot and a different way of cooking, but it's nice to have other options.

Here's a picture of the pot:

To give the pot a try, I started with a beef stew. I used the recipe from Jamie Oliver's Jamie's Dinners book, which is his best book, I think. I made a few changes -- a whole squash instead of half, and added extra carrots in lieu of parsnips because I couldn't find any. I also left out the sage and rosemary because they're expensive to buy fresh at this time of year, and substituted a bay leaf, thyme, and coriander seed. I also added a green bell pepper. It's still intact enough to say I took it from his book, though -- I did, after all, retain the half-bottle of wine he calls for.

I didn't brown the meat, but I did coat it in seasoned flour.

This is how it looked before it went in:

...and after it had been cooked for 2 hours and 30 minutes at 300F:

And what a great beef stew it was! The main feature was that the meat was perfectly tender and fell apart into flakes when you ate it.

This is the first stew I've cooked this winter, so it's a very good start to the season!

Pumpkin soup

Now that all but one of my pumpkins have been harvested, I turned two of them into pumpkin soup:

It's not the most eloquent presentation, but you get the point :)

The recipe was a good one, and I got it from Anne Sheasby's "The New Book of Soups", which is probably the best soup book I own. I originally borrowed this book from the library but there were so many recipes I wanted to make note of that I thought I should buy it.

I doubled the recipe given in the book and ended up with a stock pot full of soup, which left me with about 6-7 servings for the freezer!

So that leaves 3 pumpkins left.

Wild rice, tilapia, and mushroom & onion sauce... plus spinach!

For some (good) reason or another, I thought these would go well together and they really, really did.

You need:

• 1 filet tilapia fish
• 1 small onion
• 1.5 white/Cremini mushrooms
• 1 tbsp. butter
• 1 tbsp. all-purpose flour
• 1/3 cup milk
• 1/4 cup wild rice
• 2/3 cup water
• olive oil for rubbing tilapia
• handful of spinach
• salt and pepper

The steps are below. Obviously, you can (and should) organize these so that some of them run in parallel.

Wild rice
There's not much to this, it just takes a long time to cook (mostly unattended). Rinse and drain the rice, put it in a well-covered saucepan with 2.25x as much water as rice (i.e. for 1/3 cup rice, use about 3/4 cup water). Try 1/4 cup rice to begin with, since I found 1/3 cup a bit over-filling. Bring it to a boil and then reduce to a very low simmer and leave it there for 40-45 minutes. Remove from heat (keep it covered) and let stand for 10 minutes in the saucepan and then flake it with a fork.

Tilapia
Not much to this, either. Rubbed with olive oil, seasoned with salt and pepper, and then baked in the oven at 425F for about 10 minutes. I used High Liner frozen tilapia, which is better than the fresh I've tried (see the end of the post for more on this).

Mushroom & onion sauce
Heat about 1.5 tbsp butter in a saucepan on 60% heat. Meanwhile, cut about one-and-a-half white or Cremini mushrooms into thin slices, and dice a small onion. Add mushroom & onion to the butter when it's fragrant and bubbly. Sweat them for about 5 minutes, stirring to redistribute every minute or so. Add about 1 tbsp. all-purpose flour and stir to coat (it will look very dry). Cook for another minute. Add about 1/3 cup milk, stir, bring to a boil and then simmer for 1-2 minutes, stirring periodically. Season to taste with salt & pepper.

Spinach
Wash spinach and steam for 2 minutes.

Wine
I'm not very good at picking wines to go with food, so I just picked up the one I had on hand and it worked very well -- much to my surprise. I don't usually buy pricey wines, and this was no exception. It was Pelee Island Cabernet Franc VQA 2007 -- an Ontario (Canada) wine.

That's about it. I just put the rice around around the edge, the tilapia in the middle, the sauce on top of the tilapia, and the spinach on the side.

The only potential problem I can think of is that the quality of tilapia seems very variable. I've had frozen tilapia that tasted very good and was firm/flaky (High Liner) and fresh tilapia that was rather soft and tasted of chlorine. Since I see nothing at all wrong with the frozen tilapia (and since it is farmed and can presumably be frozen at the peak of freshness), I keep buying the High Liner stuff.

Once the rice is taking care of itself, it's a pretty quick meal, and it tastes really good. I think the reason is that the main flavours -- wild rice, mushroom, spinach -- are all quite musty in taste. You can hardly detect an edge between the three flavours and they integrate really well. The tilapia and onion are both sweet (as are the butter and milk in the sauce).