Snow day chili with beans and a hint of cocoa

Yesterday it snowed--the first significant snow in a few years here in Northern Virginia. On the tail of the snowstorm came the polar vortex--a mass of cold, hard air as inexorable and weighty as a glacier. Warmth flees before it. And the cold wind blows snow devils into the air, glittering in the sun. It's beautiful, stark, and harsh.

Cold days are good days to make chili. Filling chili, with a touch of warming spice (or a lot, depending on your taste) that satisfies hunger and banishes the cold. Serve it on rice with sour cream, a sprinkling of cheese, and some chopped onion (or any combination that you like).

What's a little different about this chili is the addition of unsweetened cocoa powder. Not to worry, it doesn't make the chili taste like chocolate, but it adds depth to the flavor and a beautiful dark color. And yes, this chili has beans, which I know  is sacrilege in some food circles, but I will gladly offend in this case, ha ha. Beans are incredibly nutritious, full of protein and fiber that will make you feel full for a long time. In this recipe I've used canned beans (organic, of course) for convenience (I know, I'm slipping), but if you are in the mood to cook your own beans, use this no-soak method, which works well for me.

Another nice thing about this chili is that you can switch up the protein: Use ground pork, ground beef, ground turkey, or ground lamb, whatever you have handy. The same is true of the beans. I like a two-to-one combination of white and pinto beans, but you can use any combination of beans.

Ingredients

• 1 lb ground beef or pork or turkey or lamb (or a combination?)
• 3 Tbsps extra virgin olive oil
• 1 large yellow onion, diced
• 2 15-oz cans of white beans (such as cannelini or Great Northern), rinsed and drained
• 1 15-oz can of pinto beans, rinsed and drained
• 1 28-oz can of ground tomatoes
• 2-3 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1-3 Tbsps chili powder
• 2 tsps unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1 tsp brown sugar
• 1 Tbsp salt (or to taste)

 

Instructions

1. Heat the olive oil in a Dutch oven over medium heat (or other large-ish, heavy pot with a thick bottom). Add the onions and cook them until they are soft and slightly brown, about 10 minutes. Stir occasionally and adjust the heat as needed so that the onions don't burn.  
2. Add the ground beef/pork/turkey/lamb and cook through.
3. Add crushed garlic and stir until you can smell it, about a minute. 
4. Add tomatoes, beans, chili powder, cocoa powder, brown sugar, and about half of the salt. Stir everything together and let it simmer for at least 40 minutes, stirring occasionally. Longer is fine if you want to start it early in the day and just let it stew. If so, keep the heat on the lowest setting, keep the lid on, and stir from time to time.
5. Before it's time to serve, have a taste and add salt as needed. Then sever it over rice and with any additions that you like. I prefer sour cream and sometimes some chopped onion. Also, if you like it hot, you could always add some sliced jalapenos.   

 Now enjoy the cold weather and keep warm.

Pork tacos for Mexican Independence Day and #SundaySupper

I must confess: Until a few weeks ago when the idea of a fiesta for Sunday Supper was first suggested, I had no idea today is Mexican Independence Day, the day when the Grito de Dolores (Cry of Dolores) was first sounded on September 16, 1810. Now the day is commemorated throughout Mexico with the ringing of bells, singing of the national anthem, and reading of the names of the heroes of the Mexican War of Independence.

My knowledge of Mexico is pretty weird and spotty. I love the great modern painters of Mexico, such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Rufino Tamayo. As an anthropology major in college, one of my favorite teachers specialized in Mexico, so I learned a lot about mestizo and indio cultures, as well as a rather detailed ethnography of a fishing village on the Gulf coast.

Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of firsthand experience of the rich culture of Mexico. I spent half a day in Juarez nearly 20 years ago. What do I have an inkling of is the richness of Mexican culinary heritage. Mexican food culture runs deep. Take something as simple and profound as a corn tortilla, which represents a legacy of transforming a simple wild grass (teosinte) into domestic corn over about ten thousand years. But that's not the whole story of corn, consider also the discovery of using slaked lime to make the nutrients of the corn available for human consumption. Another example of the brilliant, extraordinary food heritage that belongs to all humans. Because of this brilliance and the complex flavors that corn tortillas give to food, I've used corn tortillas here, but feel free to use flour tortillas if you prefer them.

Another nod this recipe makes to the deep and complex history of Mexico (and the Americas in general) is in the use of pork (and well, I just like pork). In some ways, pigs could be the poster child of the Columbian Exchange, which Charles C. Mann describes in his fascinating book, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Pigs were first brought to the Americas by Columbus himself, who had eight pigs on his ship (just in case). However, Hernando de Soto really introduced the pig into the Americas. His original 13 pigs became 700 in just a few years, not counting the escapees that became the feral pigs we still see today.* Sadly, the pigs were probably also one of the most important vectors for the diseases that decimated the Americas and distorted our perception of the level of New World civilization and the number of people who lived here before the arrival of Europeans.

I could probably go on and on about the origins, history, and heritage of the ingredients in this dish, but it would likely get tedious for anyone but the biggest food and history geeks out there. Suffice it to say that just about every food we eat has roots and history and meaning, has a story. It's easy to forget when faced with brightly colored plastic packages in the grocery store that shout "New! New! New!" and sport long lists of unpronouncable words, but not so easy to forget when faced with the dignity and simplicity of a warm tortilla, or the complexity of a mole sauce. At any rate, this recipe is a nod to Mexico and to the Columbian Exchange. I hope you enjoy it.

Ingredients

For the pork:

• pork shoulder (also known as a pork butt), about five pounds
• 2 cups orange juice
• 1/2 cup soy sauce
• juice from two limes
• 2-3 large cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
• 1 onion, thinly sliced
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tsp ground coriander
• 1 Tbsp dried oregano
• 1/2 tsp dried and ground chipotle pepper (you could also use some chopped, canned chipotles, about a Tbsp)
• 10 black peppercorns
• 1/2 tsp salt

For the tacos:

• shredded pork, drizzled with some of the juice from cooking
• corn tortillas, warmed in a cast-iron pan
• fresh tomato salsa (or just chop some good tomatoes, a little onion, a little bell pepper, and a little cilantro)
• sour cream mixed with some milk so that you can drizzle it
• shredded cheese, if desired

 Directions

1. Combine all the ingredients for the pork in a Dutch oven, or other heavy cast-iron pot with a lid. Place it in a 300-degree oven for three to four hours (turn over the meat at least once). This would probably also work well in a slow cooker.
2. Let the meat cool a little and then pull it off the bone and shred it using forks. Drizzle the meat with some of the cooking liquid. (Strain the liquid and set it aside for another use.)
3. Heat the tortillas and serve with the shredded pork, salsa, sour cream, and shredded cheese.

And now that you have some delicious, tasty tacos (if you have any leftover meat, consider making some quesadillas tomorrow, or top a salad), why don't you check out all the wonderful recipes that the Sunday Supper crew is serving up for a Mexican Independence Day fiesta. Also, please share your favorite Mexican and Mexican-inspired recipes during the #SundaySupper chat on Twitter at 7 p.m. Eastern time.

Sopas (Soups), Ensaladas (Salads), and Entremeses (Starters)

• Chicken Tortilla Soup - The Girl in the Little Red Kitchen  
• Mexican Paint Soup - Crispy Bits & Burnt Ends  
• Jalapeño Popper Dip - Chocolate Moosey
• Vegan Tortilla Soup - Galactosemia in PDX
• Texas Caviar - Ruffles and Truffles
• Cheese-Stuffed Jalapeños w/ a Tequila Sunrise - Mama's Blissful Bites
• Mexican 7 Layer Dip & Chips - The Daily Dish Recipes 
• Stoplight Salsa Recipe - Family Foodie
• Tortilla Soup with Roasted Vegetables - Diabetic Foodie
• Mini Taco Salads - Big Bear's Wife

La Comida (the Food)

• Fiesta en tu Boca Enchiladas (Chicken & White Bean Enchiladas w/ Salsa Verde) - The Hand That Rocks the Ladle 
• Gluten-Free Chicken Spinach Artichoke Enchiladas for #SundaySupper - Cooking Underwriter  
• Mexican Fiesta for #SundaySupper: Chipotle Chicken & 3 Bean Quesadillas w/ Wasabi Guacamole and Mango Salsa - Chattering Kitchen  
• Carnitas - My Catholic Kitchen  
• Tamale Pie - Noshing with the Nolands  
• Eggs Motuleños - The Meltaways
• Grilled Fish Tacos with Black Bean and Corn Salsa - Small Wallet Big Appetite
• Carne Asada - Magnolia Days
• Carnitas Avocado Pizza with Chipotle Avocado Mayonnaise Drizzle - Damn Delicious
• Frijoles Charros (Cowboy Beans) - La Cocina de Leslie
• Puerco Pibil - girlichef
• BLT Quesadillas with Avocado Mayo - Cindy's Recipes and Writings  
• Chile Rellenos with Roasted Tomato Sauce - Bobbi's Kozy Kitchen 
• Tamales with Green Chili Sauce - Dinners, Dishes, and Desserts
• Beef and Vegetable Enchiladas - Hezzi D's Books and Cooks
• Chicken Con Queso - Momma's Meals
• Baked Flautas - Home Cooking Memories
• Chunky Aztec Chocolate Granola - What Smells So Good? 
• Street Tacos Al Pastor - Sustainable Dad
• Shrimp Tacos - Pippi's in the Kitchen Again 
• Chile Relleno with Ranchero Sauce - The Little Ferraro Kitchen 
• Zippy Chipotle Shrimp & Mango Tostadas - Sue's Nutrition Buzz 
• Pork Tacos - Tora's Real Food
• Stuffed Sopapillas - Juanita's Cocina
• Chicken Fajitas - Cravings of a Lunatic
• Blue Crab Tacos - Pescetarian Journal
• Huevos Rancheros - Comfy Cuisine

Postres (Desserts)

• Chocolate Cinnamon Flan - Vintage Kitchen Notes  
• Caramel Apple Enchiladas for a Mexican Fiesta #SundaySupper - In the Kitchen with KP
• Chilli Chocolate Truffles - Happy Baking Days
• Horchata Ice Cream & Churro Brownies - Kwistin's Favorites
• Strawberry Empanadas - In the Kitchen with Audrey and Maureen 
• Plantain Fritters - From Fast Food to Fresh Food
• Fried Cinnamon Sugar Tortillas - The Watering Mouth

Bebidas (Beverages)

• Beer Margaritas - That Skinny Chick can bake 
• Hatch Chile Margarita - Shockingly Delicious
• Skinny & Spicy Watermelon Margaritas - I Run for Wine
• Refreshing Kiwi Lime Margarita - Mama Mommy Mom
• Wine Pairings for a Mexican Fiesta #SundaySupper - ENOFYLZ

* "A History of Pigs in America" by Mick Vann, The Austin Chronicle, April 10, 2009.

Reductivist thinking: How to get into a world of trouble

"Yet it is precisely this kind of thinking--the belief that productivity can and should be measured in units of time and output--that led us to the current state of affairs that produces food for the masses in the most productive, inexpensive manner possible. When we set aside as unimportant a concern for quality, for relationships, for 'meaning' in our daily food and daily activities--values considered by some to be ridiculously silly and romantic--then there is no argument. Yes, when we set those values aside, there would be little reason to ever grow our own food. Let others do it faster, cheaper, and more efficiently."

--Tanya Denckla Cobb, Reclaiming Our Food: How the Grassroots Food Movement Is Changing the Way We Eat (Storey, 2011, p. 12)

I received my copy of Tanya Denckla Cobb's new book last night, and already this quote has been jittering around in my head, bumping up against other ideas that have taken root over several years, making connections.... I have no doubt that I will have lots more to say about this book, but I want to get a few ideas down and perhaps bring them together into a stew. A delicious, nutritious stew. Heh.

If the concepts of productivity and efficiency are the only values we espouse, what does that make us as people? Well, boring. But more than that, reductivist thinking like this robs us of the values that make life interesting, satisfying, meaningful, and worth getting up for. Even those with very little infuse their lives and days with the tiniest things and moments to create meaning beyond mere survival.

In a society that talks about numbers and efficiency as much as ours seems to, losing sight of ourselves as human beings with all our bumpy, inconvenient, irregular peculiarities is pretty easy to do. If you look at, for example, the business pages, you might imagine that our world were populated with digital symbol readers that only see value in the size of a number.

Mike (my husband, for those of you who don't know that already) and I have talked about this idea that many people have lost sight of the fact that money is a representation of something, a symbol, a cipher. It’s not value itself. It’s a symbol of work, of things that have value like food and clothing and art and medical instruments and so on. The intrinsic value of money is the value of the paper it’s printed on, no more than that (ok, so maybe some ink and labor costs rolled in there too). But that representation has in some monstrous way taken over many people's minds. Some talk incessantly about return on investment, not in terms of the actual value you got out of the investment, but in terms of numbers, of symbols. Replace the numbers with ampersands and hash marks and tildes, and you start to recognize the absurdity of what's going on.

When you become blind to the value that underlies money, all kinds of decisions that (I hope) go against the grain of our humanity suddenly make more sense. Snip the tails off pigs so they don’t get infections because they are in excessively crowded conditions and start biting each other? Sure! Let’s do it, we can reduce deadloss and maximize space by squeezing in more pigs. More pigs=more pork=more sales. (Oh, we'd better figure out a way to make people buy more pork. Let's get someone smart in marketing on that. Oh I know, how about a triple pork burger with bacon?) Poison field workers with toxins while we sterilize the soil and grow hard, insipid tomatoes? Well, let’s consider the gains: More efficiency? Check. Less spoilage? Check. What about damages to the workers? Oh well, they are migrants and illegals, they don’t have the money or the wherewithal to sue us, the cost of that is negligible. What about taste? Seriously? Who cares? Especially in the middle of winter; everyone expects to have all kinds of foods all the time now.

Reductivist thinking. It gets us into a lot of pickles. (Not literally, of course, who wants to be swimming with the pickles? Where did that phrase come from anyway?) Sorry, got off track there. I was talking about reductivist thinking. Reductivist thinking detaches the symbol of meaning from actual meaning, leaving a strange, hollow, and mutilated thing. If we see only the broken representation as reality (hey, anyone else getting shades of Plato's cave here?), value becomes increasingly hard to recognize without a dollar sign on it. It's sad, and I think it stunts us all (some more than others).

Reductivist thinking does other nasty things too. Like the persistent belief that factories can manufacture food better than the earth can. Really? Plants have been around, evolving, for about 450 million years, give or take a few years. And we think we can think replicate or even do better than something that's worked that long at making itself better? We think we can turn our food intake into a mathematical equation (x protein + y carbohydrate + z micronutrients = health), sure that more vitamin C or protein or selenium will solve our health problems. But what we need is balance. Balance is one of the hardest things to achieve in living. Going extreme is just another form of reductivism. An example of reductivist thinking is glaringly obvious in American politics. One side says, "Conservatives good!" and bangs their chests, and the other side says, "Liberals good!" and puts on a riproaring display of monkey power. Woo hoo. But they don't see each other. We don't see each other. (Believe me, I can be as ornery about my views as the next person.) We don't see all the stuff we share, all the values we have in common, because all we see are the symbols that we have clothed ourselves in. How did this state of affairs come to be? How did we lose sight of value and meaning and stop caring about these things? How did we forget to value what is real, and worship only the symbols? And above all, how do you change it? You have to learn to see past the symbol and re-learn how to recognize value.

A simple meat sauce with a tiny twist

I swear the pork I am getting from "my" farmer is getting tastier. I don't know what the Haskins family is doing, but lately whenever I make anything with any of their pork products, I am taken aback by how delicious and distinct the meat is. In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan describes his experience of the chicken from Polyface Farm, Joel Salatin's grass-based farm in Staunton, Virginia, as being "chickenier" than any other chicken he had eaten before. That's the experience I have with the Haskins's pork: It's porkier than any other pork I have ever eaten before. And it's utterly wonderful and amazing. It forces you to pull back and think about the food--not take it for granted as some vague substance that will make your stomach feel less empty.

A simple meat sauce is one of the best ways to showcase flavorful meat, and it's also an easy way to get a home-cooked meal on the table. And even though you may not be able to get the scrumptious ground pork I am lucky enough to get, I suggest finding your own farmer who raises animals in humane, ethical ways by letting them live their lives grazing on grass or rooting around in forests. To find grass-fed meats near you, check out eatwild.com or localharvest.com.

Oh yeah, this sauce does have a bit of twist to it: cinnamon. Sounds weird, huh? But it's really quite fantastic. Your sauce will not come out tasting like some Frankensteinian hybrid of a meat sauce and a cinnamon bun. Instead, the small addition of cinnamon adds just a bit of complexity to the sauce that will leave everyone wondering what that amazing flavor is. Trust me on this. But be careful with it, add just a small amount.

Meat sauce served with pasta, but you could also top bread with it and make sloppy joes, fill bread dough and bake to make pierogies, stuff peppers with it, stuff and bake squash--try something crazy or keep it simple!

A simple meat sauce

• 1 lb ground pork (or beef or lamb)
• 1 large onion, finely chopped
• 3 garlic cloves, minced (or pressed through a garlic press)
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 16-ounce can of tomatoes (organic is good, homemade is even better!), slightly buzzed in a food processor to get a chunky puree
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1 teaspoon sugar (brown sugar is always nice)
• 1/8 teaspoon ground pepper
• 1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/8 teaspoon ground dried mustard
• 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme

1. Heat the oil in a deep saute pan over medium-high heat until it shimmers. Add the onions and let them get soft and a bit brown. Stir from time to time so they don't stick or burn. 
2. Add the ground pork (or whatever meat you are using). Cook until the meat is nicely browned, and you see no more pink.
3. Add the minced garlic and stir quickly for a few seconds (just enough to get the smell to rise, but not long enough to in any way burn the garlic; burnt garlic is the kiss of death for a dish). Then add the tomatoes, salt, sugar, and spices plus about a cup of water.
4. Let the sauce simmer over medium-low heat for at least 30 minutes and up to an hour to meld the flavors and get a nice consistency. Add more water if the sauce starts to stick to the bottom of the pan before your time is up.  
5. Done. Serve it any way you like. This sauce also doubles and freezes well, so you could have home-cooked food even on nights when you get home late from work and are too tired to cook. And doesn't that sound nice?

Some interesting links

When I am not cooking, writing about food, or working, I am usually scoping out food blogs and reading food-related articles. I thought I would share some interesting stuff that I recently came across.

• Tanya Denckla Cobb, a professor at the University of Virginia, recently published an article in the Virginia News Letter that highlights Virginia's role in the local food movement. This well-researched article describes the motivation behind and benefits of the movement.
• In last Sunday's New York Times, Mark Bittman discusses the so-called cheapness of junk food. He dismisses the notion that junk food really is cheaper than real, homemade food. Even though I feel as though he's a bit too dismissive of buying organic and farmer's market foods (calling them "trendy"), he raises a lot of good points about the reasons that people tend to buy junk food in favor of homecooked meals, such as the fact that most people are simply too tired to cook at the end of a long day.
• An exciting scientific discovery reported in The Scientist: Magazine of the Life Sciences suggests that what we eat may have more of an impact on our bodies than we ever imagined. Not only do we process food as nutrients, but food may also have an effect on how our DNA is regulated. 
• Takepart.com reported on a study that revealed family dinners are not just good for your physical health, but can also help keep teens from partaking in risky behaviors like drugs and alcohol and generally lead healthier, happier lives.