Meat Lover's (No Bean) Chili Recipe

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I was challenged to see if I could make a low-carb, no bean chili. I know there are lots of people who don't need beans in their chili. 

I am not one of them.

or at least I THOUGHT I wasn't one of them. I stand corrected. Very very very corrected.

This is a great chili --- it has all the spice, kick, texture, and heartiness of chili but doesn't have a single bean.  I hate it when I'm wrong.

The Ingredients.
serves 8


2 pounds beef stew meat (frozen is fine)
10 ounces smoked andouille sausages, sliced
1 (14-ounce) can diced tomatoes (whole can)
1 onion, peeled and diced
4 cloves garlic, minced (or about 2 teaspoons garlic powder)
1 tablespoon cumin
2 tablespoons chili powder
1 teaspoon kosher salt
2 cups beef broth

The Directions.

Use a 6-quart slow cooker. I didn't brown anything for this recipe, but merely plopped it all in and turned the slow cooker on. Load everything into your cooker --- meat, sausages, tomatoes, onion, garlic, and all the seasonings. Stir in the broth. Cover, and cook on low for 8 to 10 hours. For chili, the longer the better, in my opinion -- get the flavors to really meld together and provide the meat an opportunity to fall apart.

If you'd like, you can help the meat out by shredding it completely with two large forks, or you can even pulse a few times with a handheld stick blender to naturally thicken the gravy/sauce (what do you call the juice in chili?). 

Serve with your favorite toppings. My kids really like the Scoops chips that Tostitos puts out -- they ate their bowls that way.

The Verdict.
I served this on a chili night to three other families, because I was eager to test out a no-bean version. The crock was scraped clean! I've made quite a few chilis the past few years, and love having a new one to share. I think you'll really enjoy it.

Have a great day! Here are a few other chili recipes you might enjoy, and feel free to share your favorites --- you can never have too many chili options!

pizza chili
enchilada chicken chili
white bean chili
poor man's chili
sweet potato chili (vegan!)
traditional chili
21-Ingredient chili




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Quick Post: Soup's On!

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Hello, My Friends!

I made my first soup of the season today and thought I would share! It's a variation of my Spicy Bean & Veggie Soup recipe with fresh green beans in place of zucchini, and an extra can of tomato sauce thrown in the mix. With the generally cold and dreary weather as of late, this warm and hearty soup definitely hit the spot!

I start a new job tomorrow and with how hectic things have been with packing, moving, and unpacking, I wanted to make sure to have some quick and healthy leftovers when I get home this coming week. Thank goodness my kitchen is finally unpacked and organized!

I haven't posted any new recipes in a while due to the move and having all my cooking stuff packed away, but I have a few things in mind and hope to get something new posted in the next couple of weeks.

Hope you all are enjoying the holiday season so far, and stay tuned!

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Thanks for reading my blog! Please leave your thoughts, ideas, suggestions, or meals you would like to see me cook, in the comments below. Follow, share, and enjoy!

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The Fairy's Masquerade

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      I love Fall.  Brilliant leaves brighten my view for a few short days before the long and gray Seattle winter begins.  Inside, my house smells of bread baking, cinnamon and apples boiling their way into applesauce, and winter herbs adding their fragrant punctuation.  Outside, leaves decomposing, wet earth, and woodsmoke mingle together in a symphony of aromas.  Mother Nature's magnum opus.  Fall is the crescendo of the year.


       Fall brings one last chance to get outdoors before the cold sets in.  It makes me think about the woodland creatures busying themselves in preparation of the season to come.  Chipmunks storing their stash away for the long winter, frogs bedding down, birds flying south, and of course, fairies waving their magic wands to bring us little dustings of frost a la Fantasia. 

     I love to throw parties for kids where they can dress up, but don't necessarily have the same ol' Halloween experience: super scary decorations, gross things bleeding out, generic horror show stuff.  To that end, I like to go traditional, with apple bobbing like we did last year, which seems down right old-fashioned lately, or something completely different, with dress-up and fantasy, a touch of menace, but a heavy dash of whimsy.  A fairy party seemed like just the ticket this year.

Your hosts for the evening...  Danika (The Baker Fairy), Lauren (The Tree Sprite), Me (The Run Around and Bark Orders Fairy), and Tori (The Shadow Fairy).  We took this picture at the end of the evening, which is why we all look a little tired and crazy.  Lauren, in red, doesn't look particularly fairylike because she had already changed clothes.  The rest of the night she looked like this:

She made this, y'all. Hella Awesome.
  My boys wanted to be bats this year.  My eldest had to be a red bat because that is his favorite color.  And yes, there are red bats in nature.  But not this shade of red.  This is what happens when a bat falls in love with a cardinal, I think...
 Made both these costumes for under $20. My kinda costumes.

We started the night off with a few dozen balloons.  Fairies love balloons.



Our resident tree sprite painted faces.
 My son got a skull face.  The little vampire with the balloon behind him here, got a kitty face.  We had vampire-kitties, bat-skulls, butterfly-fairies, and woodland-witches all over the place!
You may remember that we had a trail in the woods last year.  We had a large tree fall this Summer and the trail is still in "recovery mode."  So this year, we used our gazebo trail.  It's shorter, but it's still windy enough to make it interesting.
Our first stop was a fairy ring.  Everybody knows that fairies love to dance!  If you find a ring of mushrooms, the fairies have been here the night before.  Be careful, though!  If you step inside, you might get whisked away to fairy land!  Some people think this is what happened to Rip VanWinkle!  (these particular mushrooms were made from Sculpey though, so the children were never in any real danger...)
We have trolls in our woods.  They're big and smelly and they don't have very good manners.  Fortunately, the fairies provided the children with some talismans to ward them off.  Each child got one before we began our trek into the forest.
Our trail had definitely been visited by fairies, the ground was covered with fairy dust! Otherwise known as mica flakes.  (If any fairies decide to move into your forest, make sure they use the real mica flakes and not the plastic ones.  Our fairies found these on ebay.  Or so I've heard...)

And every time we passed a particular tree, we could hear the fairies laughing!  Fairy laughter sounds like bells, you know...
 (In this case, it sounded exactly like black jingle-bells tied with fishing line...Strange...)
 The next stop on our quest was the fairy house, which you can only find, of course, when the door is visible.  We got lucky.

Did you know that fairies and trees are very close friends?  Trees provide shelter for fairies.  When a tree has been in the service of fairies for a very, very long time, they begin to grow faces.  This kindly gentleman was the next stop on our journey.

*Cue Menacing Music* DundunDuuuuunnnn!  The trolls were about to eat the next clue!  We had to hurry to the troll hut and find the clue in their stew pot!
  This little hut was built on a new trail off the main one.  Those trolls can be downright invasive...  Moved right in without asking.  Rude much?
 I must say, as smelly, and gruff as they are, they did some beautiful construction work...It's almost as though they had help from a tree sprite...hmmm...



  One adventurous soul braved the pumpkin guts to retrieve the final clue!

 Fairies hide in shadows all the time and consequently, they have become very good friends.  They love to play together!  Our final fairy taught the children how to play with shadows!
She had a shadow-box set up and the children made their own shadow puppets with popsicle sticks and foam stickers.  They loved it!  (Thanks to Matt Wright for the photo!)
 Fortunately, our charms worked and we didn't see any trolls! 

The rain did not hold off like it did so kindly last year so we spent the rest of the evening indoors.  First order of business was food, naturally!
Our tablescape was a moss runner, topped with a stick and more moss, leaves, and edible mushrooms with a few peanutbutter filled chocolate frogs hopping about.  We served a gluten-free quiche, a fungus tart, spiced pecans, meatballs, hot Russian tea, gluten-free cupcakes, and an assortment of hard ciders and wine.  And olives.  Because they are pretty...

A few close-ups of the table.
There was a little hill under the moss formed with the high-tech solution known as wadded up plastic bags...

This frog has become friends with an old turtle lamp we have that served as lovely mood lighting.

I was so flustered this year, I couldn't finish the fungus tart which I also made last year.  Fortunately, our resident baking fairy and her husband were kind enough to finish it for me.  (Read, do all the hard stuff...)  Thank you so much, guys!


 To follow the woodland theme, almost all of our partyware was compostable.  I wasn't able to find biodegradable wine glasses.  Get on it, manufacturers!
 Also, aren't those "birch" straws fantastic?!  Found them on Amazon by Kikkerland.
Our game fairy (aka the shadow fairy) taught the kids how to play musical flowers, fairy freeze dance, and how to have a snake relay. The kids also got fairy masks!

Our parting gifts were sucker topiaries and slacker jack owl bags.  Pinterest is a wonderful place, y'all... Again, my good friend, the shadow fairy, made these!



I cannot express my thanks enough to Tori, Lauren, and Danika who have been working on this with me since August!   None of this could have happened without you ladies.  Also, to the husbands who lent me their wives, you guys rock.  Plain and simple.  Get ready girls, I'm already formulating plans for next year!  ;)
 I hope you enjoyed looking at our little party!  If you'd like to see my idea board for this year, check out my Halloween Pinterest album.  So many great ideas out there we didn't get to implement!

Y'all Got No Idea...

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I'm about to lay on you two of my very favorite foods of all time.  Get ready.
These are Anasazi Beans:


And this is Garlic Herb Sauce: When people say "Awesomesauce" this is what they're talking about.  Even if they don't know it.
When you add rice to them you get this:
Holy crabnuggets, Metromon.  
     My next door neighbor, Nancy, turned me on to Anasazi beans a couple of years ago.  They were a favorite from her youth and she asked me if I'd ever seen any in the crazy stores I go to.  I hadn't.  These suckers are hard to find.  Then one day I ran across some and took her the very last in the bin (about half a pound).  Late last year, I actually found these beauties mislabeled as black eyed peas at a Fred Meyer nearby and then suddenly, my favorite grocery Central Market, Shoreline started carrying them!  I am in bean heaven.  (And so is Nancy!)
     Anasazis taste a little like pinto beans, but sweeter and the texture is so smooth.  There's hardly a comparison, really.
     I have only found these in bulk bins.  If you can't find them in the store, anasazibeans.com has them for $1.00 a pound.  They are totally worth paying shipping for, friends.
     Cook Anasazis like you would any other bean, soaking them overnight or doing a quick soak and then boiling them until they are soft.  They cook a little bit quicker than pintos.  These took 45 minutes unsoaked in the pressure cooker.  For this recipe, if you can't find Anasazis, try kidney beans.
     The sauce is a homemade version of one I buy from my farmer's market.  It's not perfect, but it's pretty darn close.
Garlic Herb Sauce (AKA Awesomesauce)1 1/2 C Cilantro1 C Parsley3/4 C Mint 3 very large cloves of garlic5 Tbs good quality Olive Oil2 Tbs Lemon Juice1/4 tsp Salt (heaping)1/4 tsp. Tabasco sauce
Toss the garlic in a blender and buzz until it is chopped pretty well.  Add lemon juice, salt, and 2 Tbs olive oil and blend until garlic is liquified.  Add herbs, remaining oil, and Tabasco sauce and blend until all the herbs are very finely chopped and the sauce forms a watery paste.  
Notes:

• This is best if you let it mellow in the fridge overnight, but you can use it right away if you need to.  
• This sauce will easily keep a week or more in the fridge, if you don't use it all up the first night!  
• Depending on the strength of your ingredients you may want to modify the amount of herbs you add.  The cilantro and mint I bought when developing this recipe was pretty mild.
• I love this sauce as a dip for pretzels and on warm potatoes or cold ones as a potato salad!  I've also used it to perk up hummus and I bet it would be lovely in some cream cheese as a spread on crackers.

Anasazi Beans and Rice 3 C cooked Anasazi beans3 C cooked rice (I used Jasmine but brown rice would be healthier)2 Tbs Garlic Herb SauceSalt and pepper
Basically, you cook the beans and rice and mix it all up with the sauce.  Add more sauce if you like and salt and pepper to your own taste.
Review:My husband and I love this, though I find it hard to believe anyone can love this as much as I do.  My eldest asked for extra sauce on his rice and he begs for pretzels to dip in it.  My youngest wouldn't touch the green rice with a 10 foot pole.  So that's where it stands in this house. 3 to 1 in favor of Awesomesauce.

Poor Ol' Wormy...

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There are many things as a parent Inever thought I'd say, including, but not limited to:

• “Don't use your pant leg to clean upthe pee on the floor!”
• "Did you really just barf in your boot?!"
• “Eek! There's a rat in my laundry!”(It was a toy the boys put in there as a “surprise” for Mommy...)
• “AUGH! What th--?! Don't pee on thetoilet lid!!” (OK, so that was my husband, but I think it's fair tosay he never planned on needing to say that either.)
• “Thank you so much for making mebreakfast in bed, honey but I'm just not quite ready to eat peanutbutter filled pretzels at 5 am, m'kay?”

     But yesterday I had a discussion with myson I can pretty fairly say very few other families have had. Yesterday,we buried a friend. He was a good friend. If you were to ask my sonabout him right now, he would probably forlornly tell you his sadtale and maybe shed a tear. And he would mean it. He is mourninghis loss as you would a beloved pet. The difference being, ofcourse, that Wormy is a balloon. That we had for 24 hours. Hewas steadfast until the end. He started out as a sword named“Sword”, became a hamster (apparently, if you looked at him justright) named “Hamsty”, and then, finally, tragically, he became aworm named “Wormy”. That's right. My son lost his balloonsword. We buried him in the yard. There were tears. Andthen, my son asked me something I never thought I'd have to explainabout a former balloon sword. “Mom, will Wormy go to heaven?”
     Now, my son's grief is real. This isnot a kid who is crying because he's angry his balloon popped. Hesobbed because he lost a friend. For nearly a day, he cried. Granted, he probably could have used a nap in there somewhere, butthe sadness is real. I cannot tell him it's silly to be so sad over“just a balloon” it's Wormy. It's “the best balloon [he's]ever had.” His friend gave it to him and now it's gone forever. On the other hand, how can I tell him that balloons go to heaven? Idon't believe in lying. Even in comfort. I can't even say I handledit with some magical all-encompassing answer that will follow himthroughout his life and be Pinterested and Facebooked for eternity byvirtue of its profundity. Mostly, I said maybe God has lots ofballoons in heaven to which he assured me that none of the balloonsin heaven would be as good as Wormy. Talk about deflated!

     I can say though, that I held my boywhen he cried. And I didn't laugh. We buried him because he couldn't bare the thought of his wilty orange carcassgoing into the trash. And we will have, for a while at least,a small chunk of concrete in the back yard marking the place whereol' Wormy was laid to rest. Kids have real feelings whether we feellike they “should” or not. It's important to recognize andrespond to them appropriately. Even if we don't always use the rightwords. Sometimes a hug is the best response.  Unless they are wiping pee off the floor with clothing.
    And maybe a tiny bit of comfort food never hurt, either. This also happened to be convenience food for Mama since I had fruitspoiling. Also, I put cream in it. I know what you're thinking. He was in mourning, people.


Goodbye, Wormy ShakeYields: 3-4 Servings 4 C fresh pineapple chunks2 tangerines8 oz cream (or coconut milk)1 tsp Agave nectar (opt)(optional ingredients: banana, dates,coconut flakes)
Put all the ingredients into a blenderand combine until the cream is frothy and the fruit hasdisintegrated.
Notes:If you are adding the banana or dates,you could omit the agave. Or if your pineapple is super sweet. Ours wasn't really.
  This was served with a side of sorrow*and a splash of salty tears*, but those are entirely optionalingredients. In fact, I suggest you try it when you're at yourhappiest moment and see if it doesn't taste even better.



(*Notreally, he was totally fine by the time we drank these, but itsounded poetic didn't it?)