Dear Charlotte,

It’s been a bit more than busy back in the ‘Ham, and while I haven’t stopped cooking, I have stopped writing about it.  I want to tell you about some amazing chili I made on Monday, though.  Unfortunately, I’m a little short on pictures because I had my brother and his girlfriend over and we got caught up in chit-chatting.

Easy Venison Chili:

Feeds 4

Ingredients:

• 2 small white onions, chopped
• 1 green bell pepper, chopped
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 lb ground venison
• 3 tbsp chili powder
• 1 tbsp cumin
• 1 can (16 oz) red kidney beans
• 2 heirloom tomatoes, chopped
• 1 bottle amber beer
• 1 jalapeño, chopped fine (optional)
• 1 cup grated sharp cheddar
• 1 cup sour cream

Directions:

This is a one pot recipe!  In your big pot or dutch oven if you’ve got one:

• Sauté the chopped onions and bell peppers in oil for a few minutes, until the onions start turning transparent but before they are limp.
• Add the venison.  Mush it with a wooden spoon until it starts to brown in the pot.  This should take about 3 minutes.
• Add the beer.  Add the chili powder and cumin while stirring. Let sit for about 5 minutes.
• Add the tomatoes and red kidney beans. Stir, then partially cover pot with lid. Let sit for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.
• Serve! Top each bowl with a dollop of sour cream, a sprinkling of cheese, and a pinch of jalapeño.

Notes:

It’s been a while since I’ve done chili, so I looked around at a number of different recipes to decide what I wanted to do.  Initially, I wanted to make use of the ground venison sausage I have, (which is just the ground venison with some spices added), but the spices used for the sausage (e.g. nutmeg) aren’t quite the flavor I wanted for my chili, so I used the plain venison instead.  I had also planned on using a can of black beans in addition to the red kidney beans, but my brother doesn’t like beans.  He was a good sport about leaving some in for the rest of us, so I nixed the black beans, which I think was a pretty good decision.

The jalapeño could easily get cooked into the chili for some extra bite, but my other guest doesn’t care for spicy very much (while my brother loves it!), so I left it as a garnish rather than put it into the chili.  The chili is plenty flavorful without the extra heat, so this was no real loss.  If I were to want extra heat, I think I would use an alternative pepper in the cooking process, though.  Perhaps a serrano or poblano.

Also, I went pretty mildly with the chili powder and cumin.  For chili powder, I used Penzey’s Chili 3000. This could easily take more cumin, but I wanted to be able still to taste* the gamey flavor of the venison, and the chili powder I used had quite a bit of cumin in it as well.  I think leaving out black beans was a good idea also because they’re pretty flavorful for beans, and omitting them preserved the venison flavor.

I decided to do this because I’ve got all these tomatoes. Seriously, the box has been 1/2 tomatoes for a couple of weeks now, and it was time to do something great with them. I also had some onions left over.  I picked up the jalapeño and bell pepper from the farmer’s market, so this turned out to be a pretty local pot of chili.  Would do again.

*Dude, it was not fun to write that without splitting the infinitive.