I never really understood the purpose of chili since I don't like spicy food or cooked green peppers (and used to detest hamburger meat when I only ate the cheap stuff.)  But as we've been increasing the protein content of our diets and decreasing the carbohydrates, I discovered that there are chilis that push my cooked tomato buttons without being full of empty carbohydrates.  Plus, if you make it yourself, you can keep the spiciness mild, leave out the green peppers, and use pastured meat.  This recipe serves 5.

• 1 pound of dried great northern beans
• 6 cups of homemade chicken stock.  (Boil a chicken carcass in water for a few hours and pour off the liquid to get stock.)
  
• 1 pound of ground lamb
• 2 onions
• 4 cloves of garlic
• 1 tbsp chili powder
• 1 tsp fresh thyme (or half as much dried oregano.  Our thyme is always ready to eat and tends to taste better than our oregano, so I use it for everything.)
  
• 1 tsp salt
• 0.25 tsp pepper
  
• 4 cups of homemade spaghetti sauce (or about 8 cups of stewed tomatoes, 1 onion, three cloves of garlic, and some basil)

Soak the beans overnight, then pour off the water.  Add the chicken stock to the beans and simmer until the beans are soft (about two or three hours.)

Strain the beans through a collander, tossing the liquid in a big pot along with one cup of the beans.  Freeze the rest of the beans for later meals.  (Clearly, you could have just started with fewer beans, but I've found that I'm far more likely to add beans to a recipe if I have them cooked up.  Also, the bits of bean left in the stock thicken the chili without requiring you to add cornstarch.)

Meanwhile, sautee the lamb in a skillet until it's about halfway cooked (adding stock as necessary to keep the meat from sticking to the pan.)  Cut up the onions and garlic and add them to the meat, continuing to cook over medium heat until the onions are soft.  Add in the chili powder, thyme, salt, and pepper and sautee just a bit more, then pour everything from the skillet into your pot of stock.

Throw in the spaghetti sauce or tomatoes.  (I only used spaghetti sauce because our freeezer is nearly bare of tomato products.  As I mentioned above, you could instead use about eight cups of stewed tomatoes and add a bit more garlic and onion to the previous step.  I'm not sure if we could taste the basil.)  Cook over low heat for about an hour until the flavors meld together, or for two hours if you started with stewed tomatoes and need them to lose some liquid.

The USDA's nutritional guidelines gives this chili a B+, probably because they don't like all of the fat and cholesterol in the chicken stock and lamb.  However, we're believers in the nutritional goodness of fats from pastured animals, so I'd give it an A.  Of course, the meal needs some greens on the side to round it off, and cheddar on top of the chili makes it a treat.

Want more in-depth information? Browse through our books.

Or explore more posts by date or by subject.

About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.

Powered by Branchable Wiki Hosting.