Back to your regularly scheduled blog (yay!). Wait... this blog isn't regular, nor scheduled... hrm. Well, anyway, to the point: back to experimenting! Yay!
As I type to you I am conducting an experiment in my kitchen. It is sizzling away on my stove. This experiment is chili! Wait, that's not the exciting part! The exciting part is that I'm taking my beloved chili recipe and allowing my boyfriend to make a modification to it. Anyone who knows me realizes this is a huge step for me. I mean, I really really don't like to give any kind of control in my life to anyone (can we say OCD much?) (also, shhhh! I'm talking about life not... oh, nevermind) so the very fact that I was willing to try his suggestion is a big step forward for me.
Well, at least a medium step forward since I'm already worried that said experiment is going to fail and the meat isn't even done browning yet. Wait, what's that? Didn't I tell you what the experiment was? Oh, I only said chili. Well then, I shall tell you! I am substituting the regular ground beef for... wait for it... ground turkey! (Queue dramatic music here) What do you mean that's not exciting? Well it is to me, so shhh!
Normally when I make chili I make it more-or-less the way my Mom use to make it for me when I was younger - with a few little alterations that I've made over the years. I brown one pound of ground beef (with as little fat content as possible) in a medium-sized pot, seasoning the meat with chili powders, Mrs. Dash, oregano, diced onions and dill (you wouldn't think it, but dill and chili are made for each other). Then I add a large can of chili beans, a large can of ranch beans (or 2 small cans each, if the big cans prove unavailable), a can of tomato sauce and a can of diced tomatoes. I let that all simmer in the pot until dinner time, at least 30 minutes but preferably an hour or two. Serve with whatever garnish you like, be it cheese, sour cream or fritos. I also frequently make corn bread.
Most of this has stayed the same for this batch, except that instead of ground beef I'm using ground turkey. I am also using 2 cans of diced tomatoes because I wanted a bit more tomato in my chili tonight. The smell of ground turkey is decidedly different from the smell of ground beef and it already has me worried, but I just added in all the canned ingredients and now I can't really smell a difference. I think. I will report back to let everyone know how it turns out.
In addition I am going to be making two batches of corn bread muffins - one which is gluten free. I thought, naively apparently, that corn bread would as a matter of course be gluten free as corn does not contain gluten. Apparently this was wrong. I discovered that the prepackaged corn bread mixes all seemed to contain wheat flour for some ridiculous reason! Well, a friend that is coming over tonight is allergic to gluten so we're having none of that. Or, rather, he will be having none of that. So I went ahead and bought some straight up corn meal (no wheat included there!) in order to make corn bread muffins from scratch. I'll let you know how those turn out as well. The other batch of muffins, I'm just going to use the Marie Calendar's premixed bag.
And finally I have some strawberries, some angel food cake and some whipping cream (and some Baileys!) for dessert. I will likely make two batches of the whipped cream again - one with the Baileys and one with out - as I did the last time our friends were over. It was well received that time and therefore I don't anticipate any difficulties today, but we'll see. With my luck, you really never know!
Update: So, it turns out my fears were totally unfounded. You couldn't actually taste any difference between the Turkey chili and the normal Beef that I would typically use unless you got a big bit of meat and even then the flavor wasn't bad, just a bit different. The regular cornbread muffins came out well, as they always do. I wasn't brave enough to actually try the gluten-free ones, but my allergic friend appreciated them and had more than one, so I believe him that they weren't atrocious. The dessert was good, as strawberry shortcake tends to be, although we have all come to the agreement that shortcake Success!
No comments:
Post a Comment