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WHAT ARE YOU EATING TODAY?

moose eater

Well-known member
Premium user
oh man1 there is an idea! chili is the perfect food for this time of year
i love red beans and i like the addition of the black beans as well!
-20*, you have got to be kidding me man
hope you have on your warm socks
With the back and etc. I go out less and less. I once loved the first snow. Now it just means clearing the massive driveway, turn-around and parking areas with the snowblower, and clearing off the 3 trailers and 4 vehicles.

We've got more snow coming now, and but for the plowing I ordered in for the slush deluge (8-1/2" of snow followed by a day and a half of rain which my track-drive 9-hp Honda snowblower doesn't do well with; clogs it up and I end up using copious amounts of a food-grade silicone spray I have on-hand for my commercial meat grinder inside the auger bucket and chute), I've avoided having to use the snowblower this year Winter.

Not looking forward to it now, as my back's fucked up enough that I know in advance it's apt to be near catastrophic and will likely leave me more horizontal than not for at least 3-4 days. Mother Nature sometimes teams up with Murphy in my world.

But yeah, the chili is a good winter thing to have on-hand. That, and a good spicy chicken veggie soup.
 

moose eater

Well-known member
Premium user
Mole' is done. Beans are almost done (though disappointingly finishing at different rates, meaning in order for some to be done properly, others might be a bit soft; OK for refried beans, but not so good for chili).

Next up is to heat up the giant cast iron skillet and get the 6.6-lbs of ground beef seasoned and onions and jalapeno peppers added to it.

Went ahead and added about 8 Arbol peppers (similar to a cayenne pepper) to the roasting process, then rehydrated them in the beef broth and added them to the mole' sauce. Don't think it made the chili inedible for my wife, whose pallet is fairly sensitive to spicy things since her stay in Korea 40+ years ago as an exchange student.

Mole' is currently sweet enough (likely due to the New Mexico and California chilis) that I can probably do without the monk fruit and erythritol extract granular shit that is now directly associated with heart complications.

I'll walk a couple dogs, feed one, and then into the ground meat rabbit hole we go. I think even our largest skillet might be too small for the beef, peppers and onion that still needs to go in there, and I loathe cooking the same ingredients in series, as it takes double the time for that addition. Maybe a second skillet is in order once the beans are pulled from the stove?

No pics today until maybe tonight as my wife's smart phone is the source of our digital pics. So, maybe this evening I can post some pics of chili, by which time she might have made a batch of awesome homemade corn bread (a sin for my glucose-sensitive diet) to ease any discomfort she experiences in the chili's seasoning.

"And so it goes...." (Kurt Vonnegut)
 

superx

Well-known member
Veteran
Every cast-iron pan tells a story Moose, go for the second...

My cast iron skillet goes back to the 90s, I use to season it after ever use, now it's every month or two..
If skillets could talk eh 😃

Can't beat creating something from scratch, homemade chilli is proper comfort eating and fun building the layers of flavoring, I can't resist the urge of adding extra chillies, I do the same when making curries.
Mole I'm not familiar with, sounds like a good base layer for the task at hand...

Must resist temptation man of sending the scoville levels through the roof...
 

moose eater

Well-known member
Premium user
Every cast-iron pan tells a story Moose, go for the second...

My cast iron skillet goes back to the 90s, I use to season it after ever use, now it's every month or two..
If skillets could talk eh 😃

Can't beat creating something from scratch, homemade chilli is proper comfort eating and fun building the layers of flavoring, I can't resist the urge of adding extra chillies, I do the same when making curries.
Mole I'm not familiar with, sounds like a good base layer for the task at hand...

Must resist temptation man of sending the scoville levels through the roof...
Turned out to be one of the milder chilis I've made. Still has some 'zip' to it, though. But my wife will find it edible for sure, though I suspect she'll still want to make her cornbread recipe; something I can't eat much more than a bit of if I'm not going to compromise my glucose levels.

I swear by cast iron skillets and Dutch ovens. The even heating as it's distributed across the iron, even if the skillet or pan is notably larger than the burner being used. Excellent stuff.

I try to buy only good quality cast iron anymore, as I have one shallow 10" or 12" omelet skillet here that has a warped bottom from very high heat, which is most noticeable when melting butter, lard, etc. in the bottom and the center remains high and dry... and smoking.

We admittedly don't season them often enough, though.

The mole' involves roasting de-stemmed and de-seeded dried chilis of whatever variety at about 350 f for 3.5 to 5 minutes, maybe 6 minutes, and when opening the oven door, when the smell brings a mild tear to the eye from the pungency of the aroma, they're ready.

Then I whip up maybe 12 to 16 cups of good beef broth and pour it into a huge Pyrex glass bowl, and while it's still piping hot, I put all of the dried roasted chilis in the broth and let them hydrate.

When they're good and soft, I put them into my (deceased mother's) antique Osterizer blender filling it up to about the 2/3 to 3/4 level with each batch, adding several; cups of the broth mixture until they're submerged with maybe an inch or so of the liquid above the chilis and the chilis only slightly packed into the blender, but not tightly packed, and add maybe 5-6 fat cloves of garlic per blender full, about 2/3 to 3/4-cup of fresh sweet onion per blender, a couple tsp. of ground cumin per blender, and a bit over a tsp of sea salt per blender. Then I hit the highest speed until it turns into a beautiful thick red sauce.

Take a TBSP or so (my batch today used close to 2 TBSP, as it was large in volume as usual) of the whole wheat pastry flour and avocado oil or preferred oil in the bottom of the 5-quart French saucepan (I used to use a good extra-virgin olive oil, but don't anymore due to carcinogens or toxins put off by olive oil under high heat conditions) and whisk the oil and flour until the flour begins browning and is integrated into the oil.

(*I add a half-cup or so of good extra-virgin olive oil to the <4-gallons of chili once it's done, for the olive oil flavor).

Then turn your heat under that sauce pan down and pour your first blender full of mole' sauce into the flour and oil mixture, whisking until integrated and it begins thickening. If the oil and flour blend is too hot when you pour your mole' into it, it'll bubble as a thick sauce can and likely paint your kitchen/stove red like someone got stabbed to death in there!! :)

Today I poured in about 2-2/3+ blenders full of the mole' sauce, or almost 4 quarts of the mole' sauce when the sauce was finished, in order to have enough of the mole' for what turned out to be not quite 4 US gallons of pretty nice chili.

Turned out that all of the 6.6-lbs. of ground meat fit nicely into the LARGE skillet, and I added about 1-1/3 LARGE (HUGE!!!) sweet onions to that, as well as more seasonings. Definitely NOT Americanized chili. :)
 
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dramamine

Well-known member
That mole' sauce technique applied to chili sounds excellent, Moose. I'm taking notes over here. I have yet to make a chili that wasn't too spicy for my wife. "It's right there in the name", I tell her. Need to work on that. Good job keeping the heat in check.
 

moose eater

Well-known member
Premium user
That mole' sauce technique applied to chili sounds excellent, Moose. I'm taking notes over here. I have yet to make a chili that wasn't too spicy for my wife. "It's right there in the name", I tell her. Need to work on that. Good job keeping the heat in check.
Thanks.

It's the same mole' sauce I make for traditional Northern Mexican tamales. One of my more destructive addictions in recent years, and which I have to avoid now for the most part.

We used to make those out of chicken, pork, and moose. I found the moose tamales lasted better for long-term freezing as they had less fat in the meat, and over time things that have higher fat content are prone to going slightly rancid or changing for the worse in the freezer.

I had as poor a degree of self-control with good tamales as I did with clean coke back in the day. Once I started eating GOOD tamales, I'd consume until I was in pain, complain about it a bit, then get up and go get another one! :).

The mole' was served on top of the tamales, as well as integrated into the meat that they were filled with.
 

moose eater

Well-known member
Premium user
Safeway ran a sale on what was supposed to be tri-tip steaks and roasts this last Friday, for all of $5/lb.

Despite her cramped schedule, my wife stopped in and picked up a couple family packs weighing just over 4-lbs. each, or about 8+-lbs. total.

I've cut beef tri-tip steaks and roasts before and these don't look like them, unless they were cut from an entirely different angle than I cut mine from... Always possible.... Unlikely, but possible.

They look like VERY thick New York Top Loin (over 1-1/2" thick) and are sorta' almost labeled as such. But feathered nearly perfectly; thin veins of fat running everywhere with no overt clods of fat. Perfect marbling!

So, for brunch we had one of those each from under the broiler, set to high heat with the broiler pan right up close and personal to the heating elements, with frequent re-searing after the first go at it (mine was thicker and larger and was right at the cool end of rare, where I like it, and my wife's was slightly smaller and notably narrower, and hers was done to her liking at medium-rare).

Then we added to it with some of the German Butterball spuds from the garden, pre-nuked (to ~60% done), then radically cooled under running (very cold) water, and chopped for home-fried potatoes, and an egg over-easy for each of us.

An exceptional and unusual brunch for us, but WAY too much food (some left-over steak bits in the refrigerator now). Now I'll have to do some work in order to prevent an upward movement on the bathroom scale. Fuck!!
 
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PadawanWarrior

Well-known member
make sure you got your banana hammock and sun screen packed up
/ i hope you and the mrs have a great time
that skirted heifer place looks pretty awesome
i like their take on the burger and it looks like a decent place with great prices
we have some decent burgers here in san diego but the prices are getting stupid
/ one place we used to like was slaters 50/50

turns out they have a location in denver, but it just seemed like it their prices are out of control and i am not paying $20 for a burger
Hey we stopped by Slaters 50/50 in Denver today. We were there during brunch so we got biscuits and gravy and a tater top breakfast skillet with an orange juice. It was only $40 including the $5 tip. He might have forgot to charge for the juice, but I thought it was a decent price for what we got. They validated our parking too.

I'll try a burger next time but since we were there during brunch I figured we should try that since it's only on Sat and Sun 11am-2pm. Here's a pic I just took of our leftovers. Thanks for the tip PopRocks. Good call!
20241116_155418.jpg
 

mike-or-ozzy

Well-known member
Hey we stopped by Slaters 50/50 in Denver today. We were there during brunch so we got biscuits and gravy and a tater top breakfast skillet with an orange juice. It was only $40 including the $5 tip. He might have forgot to charge for the juice, but I thought it was a decent price for what we got. They validated our parking too.

I'll try a burger next time but since we were there during brunch I figured we should try that since it's only on Sat and Sun 11am-2pm. Here's a pic I just took of our leftovers. Thanks for the tip PopRocks. Good call!
View attachment 19101170

Cool beans @PadawanWarrior and I like the cardboard box versus styro anyday.
 

pop_rocks

In my empire of dirt
Premium user
420club
Hey we stopped by Slaters 50/50 in Denver today. We were there during brunch so we got biscuits and gravy and a tater top breakfast skillet with an orange juice. It was only $40 including the $5 tip. He might have forgot to charge for the juice, but I thought it was a decent price for what we got. They validated our parking too.

I'll try a burger next time but since we were there during brunch I figured we should try that since it's only on Sat and Sun 11am-2pm. Here's a pic I just took of our leftovers. Thanks for the tip PopRocks. Good call!
View attachment 19101170
oh wow man! i did not know they even had brunch, so i ahd to check i just got off the phone with the location close by and they do! sat/sun it is $12 for the basic deal ( she said its just like the breakfast burittos) or $13 for the works (everything on the menu)
that sounds like its totally worth the extra dollar
i am going to have to plan a trip out man, i love biscuits and gravy! and i can always go for some loaded tots
i can eat breakfast foods all day
i found this new banh mi place that has awesome sandwiches at a great price (this one is about $7)
paris banh mi.jpg

its pork roll with ham and the pickles veggies (carrot and daikon) plus cilantro
the vietnamese know how to bake bread
last time i was there i saw they had these chicken pastries for like $1.50/ea, so i grabbed a bunch of those last night too
chicken pastery.jpg

these things are the bomb
 
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shithawk420

Well-known member
Veteran
Speaking of chili my mom made some last night.i don't like beans so no beans.its good but I think it's to thick.needs more liquid.she makes good chili but she does things i dont like.like using turkey instead of beef and using tabasco.ill make a proper chili one day.sorry for bad pic.no lighting.needs more peppers too.guess we didnt have many
20241116_183401.jpg
 
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armedoldhippy

Well-known member
Veteran
wife and i hit a steak place after church today. after all of the sub-quality meat i've had foisted off on me since COVID hit, it is a pleasure to report eating as good a filet as i've had in my life. i asked for med-rare, and got RARE instead, and i've never been so satisfied with a steak/mistake as i was with this one ! it was so tender that it fell apart instead of allowing me to cut it. to think i almost got a loaded baked tater instead... :eek:a big salute to the folks out back at Texas Roadhouse! :love::tiphat::thank you:
 

pop_rocks

In my empire of dirt
Premium user
420club
Thanks.

It's the same mole' sauce I make for traditional Northern Mexican tamales. One of my more destructive addictions in recent years, and which I have to avoid now for the most part.

We used to make those out of chicken, pork, and moose. I found the moose tamales lasted better for long-term freezing as they had less fat in the meat, and over time things that have higher fat content are prone to going slightly rancid or changing for the worse in the freezer.

I had as poor a degree of self-control with good tamales as I did with clean coke back in the day. Once I started eating GOOD tamales, I'd consume until I was in pain, complain about it a bit, then get up and go get another one! :).

The mole' was served on top of the tamales, as well as integrated into the meat that they were filled with.
oaxaca makes great moles and one of the recipes i took home with me was this one with chocolate in it!
yeah man! chocolate
it stood out in a world of good moles
 
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