“I Don’t Know What I’m Doing Chili (a work in progress)”
- 3 large plum tomatoes, chopped
- 1 medium jalapeño, unseeded + 1 small jalapeño, seeded
- 1 red + 1 green pepper
- 1 small white onion (or ¼ of a large onion, which I actually used)
- 1 can each: red kidney beans, black beans, corn, drained and rinsed
- 1 lb ground turkey
- 6 cloves garlic
- 5 cups water
- Dash of ketchup
- Splash of white vinegar
- 2 tsp olive oil
- 1 2/3 tsp cumin
- ½ tsp cayenne
- 2 tsp oregano
- Enough sea salt to fit in a cupped hand
- Flour and/or cornmeal for consistency (see below)
- Boil tomatoes, garlic, oregano, cayenne and cumin for around 30 minutes. While that’s resolving chop the other stuff.
- Cook the onions, peppers and turkey. You don’t want to cook the turkey completely, but halfway through the turkey cooking, add the jalapeños.
- Combine everything in a large pot (hopefully the pot you started cooking the tomatoes in) and cook at very low heat for something like 2 hours. It’ll turn into a pretty watery mess (even though the 5 cups of water was barely enough to boil tomatoes in), so add corn meal and/or flour to thicken it until it’s less like soup. Ideally, you’d probably use cornstarch, as it’s a happy medium.
Having never worked with jalapeños, I didn’t really know how to cook them, or more correctly, I underestimated them. I do enjoy them, seeds and all, so I was unafraid to add them to the mix, but they ended up overpowering it more than I thought they would. In the future, I’d probably just use 1 unseeded jalapeño. I ate it over rice and enjoyed it enough, though I think it was mostly because I was ridiculously hungry at this point.
UPDATE: I had some for lunch on the day after, and it wasn’t as peppery. Might have been feeling literal heat as opposed to pepper-heat; I did kind of eat it as soon as I could shovel it into a bowl (see Ridiculous Hunger, above.)
