I posted my foolproof chili recipe a few weeks ago in a post that I tersely entitled "How to make dinner the day you get back from vacation without having to stop at the grocery store on the way home from the airport."
I would like to submit the same recipe under a new title, viz., "What to do when, in charge of having dinner ready for two families by 5 p.m., you lift the lid of the crock-pot at 4:20 p.m. only to discover that 8 hours of cooking has not softened the beans in the soup one bit even though you remembered to soak them overnight before putting them on to cook in the morning."
Hannah was with me when I made the terrible discovery (she was, after all, scheduled to take the soup home to her own family). We had to make a split-second decision. Try to rescue the bean soup, or make something else? We were both on tight schedules; she had to drive home, and my oldest had a 6 p.m. swim lesson. Down to the freezer! "Here, run upstairs and start this defrosting," I said, thrusting into her hands two pounds of ground beef, "I’ll look for stuff to put in it." I found two cans of chili beans (half what I needed) and some cans of tomatoes and tomato paste. Upstairs in the kitchen I found a can of pinto beans and a can of spicy refried beans. "I put refried beans into my chili sometimes to thicken it," commented Hannah, who was already starting to open cans. I chopped two onions and sauteed them while she finished opening the cans, then grabbed the cans and dumped them into the onions with the necessary spices.
The meat was still defrosting. Eleven minutes left on the meat. Too long! Hannah opened the microwave, squeezed one of the packages experimentally, declared it thawed enough and pulled it out. While I stirred and heated the onion/tomato/bean mixture, she started to brown it in a separate skillet. As soon as it wasn’t pink anymore she dumped it into the chili pot. It was 4:45. We set it to simmer. I grated some cheese for the top. Since we had already made cornbread to go with the ill-fated bean soup, dinner was done!
I sent Hannah home with several mason jars full of chili and several more full of half-cooked bean soup to be finished in her own crock-pot for the next day’s dinner.
Well, eventually. Before he could sit down to eat, my husband had to jump-start her dead car. But we got to our swim lesson on time!
(By the way, it turns out that the chili is very nice with cornbread instead of spaghetti. So if Ohio-style isn’t your own, try it. I also think the chili goes well on tortilla chips, baked potatoes, or scrambled eggs.)
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