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Recipe: chocolate stout chili

It can get pretty cool where we live… sometimes down to -20F. I don’t mind the cold. I actually enjoy stepping out into the winter air and feeling the inside of my nose crackle when I breath in. The only real hardship of winter that we encounter is the wind (because snow isn’t hardship, it is recreation). And we encounter it up to 100 mph at times. So while I might not feel cold in 10F, I will feel chilled to the bone at 32F with a wind whipping away every unit of heat my body produces (and I produce a lot of heat – some may call it hot air). It’s blowing today and I can hear the loose sections of roofing flapping in the gusts. I sincerely hope the roofers call before the pieces go flying off into… Kansas.

Soups and stews are so utterly perfect for cold weather days. When I was a graduate student in central New York, I would rally a chili cookoff among the graduate students during this time of year. We always had an impressive array of chilis that included: curry, chocolate, beer, vegetarian, chicken, or the hottest hot you could imagine. It was always a geochemist who went for entering the hottest chili. That’s when my friend Ben thought he made chili from the butt of a pig. He kept chuckling, “Mine is made from Pork Butt.” We finally told him he was an idiot and that the pork butt is part of the shoulder. I should also note that the majority of our cookoff participants were men!

My most recent incarnation of chili involves two of those inspired variations from the cookoffs: chocolate and stout. Chocolate stout, to be precise. I have one of those prize-winning recipes that requires throwing in chorizo, a cow, and a pig, and a million other ingredients, but I like this simple recipe because it’s something you can whip up fairly quickly and because the guys at the local liquor barn get a kick out of my food-related booze purchases.

Recipe: roast chicken

This past weekend we had roast chicken for dinner in which I finally got off my bum and took pictures. I had a fear of roasting until two or three years ago. That is in large part because I didn’t know what roasting was. One of my favorite cooking magazines is Fine Cooking by Taunton Press. It’s not just the pretty pictures (you can probably tell that I’m a visual person), but I like that they don’t advertise diamonds, luxury cars, cruises, and other things I can’t cook with. They had a lovely spread on how to roast a chicken or two and just like that, I was ready to roast.

Roast chicken is a basic in any cook’s repertoire, and it tastes fantabulous for very little effort. My official taste tester jumps up and down when he sees roast chicken appear on our weekly menu. I just wish I had learned about it earlier, but there is no time for regrets in life! I generally start the day before with a straightforward salt rub of salt, pepper, garlic, and lemon zest.

Recipe: soy sauce chicken

Hrm, some recent developments might require that I curtail the posting frequency. Not sure. We’ll see how it goes in the next few weeks.

A few folks have inquired about the lunch I had in this entry, so I figured I should write it up seeing as it is a great dish in cold weather months.

Chinese noodle soups in my mind are as versatile as sandwiches. You can put whatever you want in them. I think of it in terms of a few major components: the noodles, the broth, the fixins. Noodles can be bean thread (aka glass noodles), soba, somen, iron man, ramen, rice noodles, and the list goes on. The broth is whatever you want it to be. The fixins can be vegetables, meat, leftover stir-fry, delicious spicy chili radishes (my fav!)…

We’ll start with one of my standards: soy sauce chicken. It’s just chicken drumsticks simmered for a few hours, but what you get is chicken and a lovely aromatic broth.