...Crockpot Chili

So, I knew that when we moved from palo alto to Cleveland the weather would be, shall we say, less than perfect and at times chilly. After a relatively mild October, fall finally showed up this week with morning temperatures into the 30s. Brrrr.... I awoke Thursday AM to a chill in the air, overcast skies, and the day off. Can't think of a better day to try my hand at making some chili, something I had never done before but had been meaning to try out!

With my morning coffee in hand, I googled some recipes online. A search for "mexican crockpot chili" and "paleo crockpot chili" yielded some promising results. I omitted beans, and blended a few recipes to come up with one that I hoped would make a dericious dinner later that night. 

The Recipe:
2lb ground beef
2 medium onions
1 grreen bell pepper
6 stalks celery
1/2 jalapeno
1 28 ounce can diced tomatoes
1 4oz can trader joe's fire roasted green chiles
3 tablespoons ancho chili powder
1/2 tsp cumin
1 tsp oregano
2 chipotle chilis in adobo sauce
garlic
salt and pepper to taste

D and I had signed up for a CSA over this summer that had included 1/8 of a cow. In other words, we have a lot of grass-fed ground beef in our freezer right now (although less than you might think after a few months of paleo eatin'). I threw one of those packages into the microwave to defrost while I chopped up all the vegetables.

I browned the meat, then removed it from the pan. In went the onions, pepper and celery. After the onions were getting soft, I added the garlic, gave it about a minutes then added back the beef along with the chili powder, oregano, and cumin. I sauteed it for a few minutes, then removed from heat and into our slow cooker.

To that I added all the rest of the ingredients, and stirred it together. I set the cooker on LOW for 8hours and left it on the counter to go do all my other errands of the day.

After two hours or so I checked on the connoction. It tasted good, but still something was missing. Back in May, D and I went to a tiny authentic mexican restaraunt in Southern Utah when we were hiking around Bryce and Zion canyons. Nestled on top of the Chicken tortilla soup I ordered was a chipotle chili in adobo. It gave the soup a wonderful smoky flavor. I figured that smokiness might lend itself well to the chili so I lovingly placed two large chilis right on top of the cooking food and replaced the lid.

Later that night, when D got home from work we made a fire in the fireplace (!) and I served up two big bowls of chili garnished with some chopped cilantro. D put some sliced avocado on his too. His verdict: "this is amazing". The adobo added a wonderful complexity to the rest of the flavors. We both gobbled it down and then played some crabbage err cribbage by the fire. It was a wonderful fall night. And a recipe that I'll have to repeat in the future!