cold-weather cooking

[desayunoencama]

So, today I had an urge to make 4-bean chili (using dried red, black, and kidney beans, and chick peas).

Of course, this being Spain, there's no such thing as chili powder available, so I had to improvise.

Spain, contrary to almost every other former empire, has not maintained culinary ties with its former colonies. Thus, trying to find Mexican or Cuban or Peruvian or whatever Latin American cuisine in Spain is quite difficult.

Whereas, I would hazard to say that one could probably get better Indian food in England than in many places in India, if only because of the quality of the ingredients available.

Anyway, the chili turned out fine, although not as I was expecting it to taste. It did achieve it's purpose, though, which was to make me break out in a sweat (it's COLD in Madrid lately!) I had too much water left I decided, after I had the first bowl, so I added some rice and left it on the fire. (The beans were not fully cooked, either, but it had only been maybe half an hour. I love my pressure cooker!) Much better with the rice. I forgot that I had bought carrots yesterday, though, and would've liked to add them, too. Oh well.

(Basically, it was the aforementioned four dried beans, one chopped onion, chopped garlic, all the leftover potatoes (maybe half a kilo? less after the sprouted eyes were cut out), a can of corn, a can of crushed tomatoes, cayenne, cumin, turmeric, salt, and water. And later, rice. Aside from the cans, which are a sort of unit of measurement, everything else was handfuls or eyeballing it.)

Comments

[larryhammer]

I currently spice my chilis with dried chiles (living in a ristra-abundant city a half-day's drive from 2/3 of the country's chile crop, getting them is easy), cumin, onion, garlic, and—lately—oregano. Other ingredients are beans, ground meat, and tinned tomatoes. The last batch was emu meat, but usually it's beef, turkey, or bison. Beans vary—there's a heritage seeds foundation shop in town, so again some odd-n-tasty things end up in the pot. For with, I like white rice (cooked separately) or quick drop-biscuits.

Mmm. Chili.

---L.

[desayunoencama.livejournal.com]

Since I'm in my 20th year of being a vegetarian, I've never had emu meat (it wasn't in vogue three decades ago) although one does find it/ostrich meat in Spain pretty easily. I remember being so surprised the first time someone ordered it and this red-meat showed up, I thought I'd made a mistake in translating the menu for my carnivorous dining-mate...

We almost bought some emus, a few years back, but they're really really messy. We'd driven all the way out to the tip of Long Island, and we're wandering around wondering if it's the right place as there are all these stockade fences, but all of a sudden these emus heads pop up to stare at us and mom knew we'd found it at last. She bought a herd of fat pygmy goats instead, and was furious because by the time we'd driven home with them all in the trailer and the back of the car they were all ailing, and she was sure she'd been gypped and they'd sold her a herd of sick goats. But it turned out they were pregnant, and had gone into induced labor because of the car trip...

(Mom satisfied her avian cravings by raising parrots, instead. She's down to thirty something parrots at the house, from over seventy a few years ago when the aviary was in full swing...)

[janni.livejournal.com]

http://www.davesgourmet.com/insauces.html (particularly the six-dried-chile package at the bottom) Dunno what overseas shipping runs, though.

We're overloaded enough on dried beans right now that we're not allowed to buy anymore until we use up what we have. Consequence of realizing we're near a heritage bean foundation (focused on preserving local--generally more flavorable than supermarket--varieties) is that all the more traditional beans have gone untouched, some for several years.

Similar rule applies to our overstocked rice. Fortunately, the two go together pretty well. :-)

[desayunoencama.livejournal.com]

There are great beans available here in Spain, too.

For me, it was a major discovery to find that there are all sorts of differnet types of lentils, too. (I usually use pardinas now, which are the tiny ones.)

They have these special beans for use in paella--garrafones--that are much more expensive than meat. They're extremely large flat beans, not as easy to find in Madrid as on the coast in Valencia, Alicante, etc.

And I absolutely love my pressure cooker. :-)