This weeks shopping trip did not result in as much angst as last week's. I did not know that "Great Northern" was a type of bean, I thought it was a brand. That was easy enough to work out once I did my pre-shopping Googling. Then I got to the store and was a bit confused by chicken stock vs chicken broth, but they had both, so I got what the recipe called for. Then on Friday night I wanted to do a quick check on soaking the beans. I'd never done so. Turns out there are a lot of opinions on how, why, when, to soak or not to soak... In the end, I just went ahead and soaked as called for. As an aside, when I bought the Great Northern beans, I also bought a package of barley and made homemade beef barley soup on Friday night, another first. Yum.
As for the requirement to crush the oregano, I'd gotten some suggestions in the comments (thanks!), but then I stopped in at my new favorite discount store and look what found...
MOTAR! Sounds like a foe of Gamera and Rodan and Godzilla. It certainly became a foe of the oregano this recipe calls for!
But on to the cooking... I got started on this a little bit later than I should have, because it calls for 2.5 hours of cook time. Luckily there wasn't a lot of prep work required. And since there wasn't a lot of prep, I didn't take many pictures.
The process was fairly simple. Soaked the beans overnight, then drained them. Tossed them into a large pot - I used a Dutch oven - with two cups of the chopped onion, the garlic, salt, and stock. Here again, my onion size issues came up. I guess the onions I bought were not up to "medium" specification, so I didn't have two cups of chopped onion to start with, and the recipe called for the "remaining onions" to be used later. So I put in most of what I had and saved the rest. Brought it all to a boil, then reduced the heat and cooked for two hours, covered. Here is what it looked like when took off the cover to stir the pot, so to speak.
After two hours, the green chiles, all the spices, and those pesky onions went in and everything cooked for another 30 minutes (still covered).
Easily served by spooning some into a bowl and topping with cheese.
Note the darker color of the broth, that's all due to the added spices. It tasted really good, although I have one quibble. In the last half hour of cooking, when I opened the lid to stir, I felt a little overwhelmed by the smell of cloves, and got a bit of that with the bowl sitting in front of me. I can't say that I tasted them separately, but I'm not a huge fan of the aroma (bad association with smoky bars and hipsters in my younger days), so I might skip that ingredient next time. I did use twice the amount of cayenne called for. I like cayenne, and it was a suitably spicy bowl of chili. Would I make it again? Definitely, or at least a halved version. There's a whole lot left. I'm going to broil some chicken later today to have with some of the leftovers. And I might even put some salsa on top, 'cause that's how I roll.
Lessons Learned - pay attention to the total time required. I ended up eating dinner at close to 9 PM, which is pretty late for an early riser like me.
Tools Needed - nothing else needed this week, now that I have MOTAR, who is a friend to children.
Skills Needed - nothing this week, what with the dead simple prep.
Tune in late Wednesday for the next selection....
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