Getting Snowed In Chili

We interrupt this cookie baking madness for the following chili recipe:

Butternut Squash Chili
1T vegetable oil
1 lb lean ground beef (or substitute soysage for vegetarian, or leave it out!)
2 onions finely chopped
4 cloves garlic minced
1T cumin seeds toasted and ground (or just use already ground cumin!)
2t dried oregano
1t salt
1/2t black pepper
1 cinnamon stick (or 2t ground cinnamon, but the cinnamon stick gives it a nice flavor)
1 28oz can diced tomatoes in juice
3 cups cubed butternut squash (peeled, one inch cubes)
2 cups canned kidney beans rinsed and drained
2 dried new mexico, ancho or guajillo chilies
2 cups boiling water
1/2 cup coarsely chopped cilantro

In a large skillet, heat oil over medium high heat. Add beef and onions and cook stirring until beef is no longer pink, about 5 minutes. Add garlic, cumin, oregano, salt, pepper and cinnamon stick and cook for 1 minute. Add diced tomatoes with juice and bring to a boil.
Place squash and beans in a 5 quart slow cooker and cover with sauce. Cover and cook on high 3 to 4 hours or low 6 to 8 hours, until squash is tender.
Half an hour before its done, soak dried chiles in boiling water for 30 minutes in a heatproof bowl. Drain, reserving 1/2 cup of the soaking liquid. Discard stems and chop the chiles coarsely. Add to slow cooker with cilantro and stir well. Cover and cook on high 30 more minutes until hot and bubbly.

I'm not following the recipe exactly today cuz I don't have all the ingredients and I certainly am not going shopping! It looks like we've got at least 4 inches already and it's still coming down! But as my journalism mentor Mrs Bigglestone told me: you have to know the rules to break them. I've made this recipe at least 4 times and it's consistently delicious. Try it!

Here goes:
First, we cut up some squash. I have a bunch in storage from the garden---butternuts which grew by themselves out of compost (score!) and sunshine kabocha squash which have developed REALLY hard skins over the last couple months. This is good news for long term storage, but bad news for my knives.

Here you can see the dark orange of the sunshine squash and the paler golden orange of the butternut. Orange vegetables are super good for you! Beta Carotene, baby.
Gather all the other ingredients:

I started with a couple tablespoons of olive oil in the dutch oven, then added the onions to wilt. Meanwhile, I thawed a pound of grassfed ground beef from Harmony Hill Farms in Evans City. Grassfed beef is a lot less fatty than factory beef so the extra oil is helpful. Plus, you don't need to drain anything off!

So I'm not normally a recipe person---I like to read them, but I rarely cook from them. As I said I've actually followed this recipe several times, and one thing I learned from it is to add the garlic AFTER the onions are nice and sweated. My years of vegetarian cooking conditioned me to add onions and garlic at the same time, and invariably the garlic would get crispy before the onions were nicely done. Now I follow this method and the burnt garlic is a thing of the past!
Anyway, while the beef browned, I toasted all of my spices together in a cast iron pan. Instead of using whole spices I used ground cumin, cinnamon, oregano and chimayo chile powder. This is a major deviation from the recipe in several steps but hey, I wanted this to come together quick and easy!

In goes the toasted spice mixture, and the squash and plenty of salt.


Then, drained and rinsed kidney beans, fire roasted diced tomatoes, and one tomato can worth of water.

You know about the tomato can of water, right? This is a frugal depression era grandma thing. Instead of ever measuring water for chili or soup or anything really with tomatoes, you just fill up the can. That way you don't miss any of the delicious tomato sauce from the sides. Plus, you've rinsed your can for recycling without wasting any water! I guarantee that just about any recipe you are adding canned tomatoes to you will be adding an equal amount of water.
So now it's just going to simmer on the stove for an hour or so. I'm doing it on the stove because there are way too many things on the counter from cookie production to drag out the crock pot (and because I am hungry NOW and didn't plan ahead for 5 hours of slow cooking!) but I can vouch for the crock pot method. I'll follow up later.
Oh! Let me just add that if you are shopping for ingredients for this chili, the cilantro really does take it over the top (unless of course you are a cilantro hater. I know you're out there. ;) I really need to plant some in a window so I have it available for chili making over the winter.
Once the squash is tender and everything is all blendy, I am going to serve this to myself with some sour cream and buttered tortillas. I can't wait.