Recipe#5456

Title: Chili 10

From: hillary@hillary.net (Hillary Gorman) 
 Newsgroups: net.food.spicy 
 Subject: mmmm. chili :) 
 Date: 14 Sep 1997 15:25:25 GMT 
 Message-ID: slrn61o0f4.e6u.hillary@tiger.misty.com 

I made some chili the other day. All my life I've wondered about that red
 powder they sell and call "chili powder," it's always bothered me. I
 wanted to see if I could make chili that tasted like chili without using
 that stuff. I found out that I could, with minimal difficulty :)
 Basically, here's what I did:
 Browned 1 lb of ground beef and 1/2 lb of ground pork in a frying pan,
 then moved the meat into the pot in which I planned to cook the chili.
 Then I chopped a REALLY BIG ONION up, and browned it, along with about 1/2
 of head of garlic, also chopped, in the grease left in the frying pan.
 Then I moved the onions and garlic into the pot with the meat. Then, I
 took 2 serrano chiles, 2 jalapeno chiles, 1 long yellow hot chile, 2
 poblano chiles (which I had already scorched over a flame, just for
 kicks), and about 1/4 of a habanero chile, all chopped up, and cooked them
 a little bit in the frying pan, just til they softened, and then I added
 them to the chili pot as well. Then I threw into the pot one bottle of
 some light ale style beer I had lying around, a can of tomato paste, two
 cans of "mexican style" stewed tomatoes, 1 chopped roma tomato that I had
 lying around, the juice of 1/2 lime, a bunch of ground cumin (no idea how
 much - I added until it tasted right), a bunch of dried oregano, and a few
 shakes of something I had called "mexican spice" which is a mixture of
 black and white pepper, dried onion, dried garlic, and oregano. I let that
 cook a long time, then I added a handful or two of fresh chopped cilantro.
 I let the whole mess cook for several hours. It came out really well, and
 was pleasantly spicy. It wasn't TOO spicy - some of the folks eating it
 were not chile heads. But that's easy to fix by adjusting the blend of
 chiles. :)