Tonight’s permutation of the recipe follows:
2 chicken breasts, cooked in recaito
2 1/2 med carrots, shredded
2 1/2 tbsp recaito
honey [1 tsp?]
16 oz salsa verde
1 envelope Herbox
1 cup water
29 oz cannellini, rinsed and drained
16 oz red kidney beans, rinsed and drained
1 white onion, chopped
2 tbsp cumin
1 tbsp + 1 tsp paprika
1 tbsp cilantro
1/2 head garlic, minced
salt
frozen peas
frozen corn
Thaw chicken breasts. Slash. Place in glass baking dish in two layers of tin foil. Moosh recaito into the slashes and over the top of the breasts — a total of 1 to 2 tbsp. Wrap tin foil around them so they are covered. Cook at 450 degrees for at least 25 minutes. Shred.
Put all the ingredients except frozen veggies together in slow cooker. Fill the rest of the space in slow cooker with peas and corn. Stir thoroughly, making sure recaito and spices distribute evenly through ingredients. Cook on low for at least 8 hours. Check at least once to stir and make sure there’s enough liquid.
Notes:
Cooking chicken in recaito is my attempt to make it more flavorful. Also recaito seems like garlic — you can pretty much never have enough. There’s a lot of recaito in this version…
Carrots added per my previous notes.
Amount of honey was not measured — just enough to cut any heartburn-producing acidity.
I’m not a particular connoisseur of beans, but I’ll see if the cannellini make a difference in the taste.
White onions are nice and crunchy and juicy — good cooking onions!
Double the cumin from last time because cumin is the shit!
Increased amount of paprika, just for the hell of it.
Whoops, forgot the chili powder. I don’t feel like it was doing anything important last time, though.
Plus cilantro because cilantro is the shit, although not the the extent of garlic and cumin.
Salt to tie things together and highlight the flavors. I tend to skip salt, assuming that there’s enough sodium in everything else, but a judiciously applied amount of salt can have significant and subtle effects on the cohesion of a dish. Also it just tastes good, even if it is not as much of the shit as garlic, cumin, recaito, cilantro, etc.
The frozen veggies bulk up the chili and make it a one-pot meal, very appealing for us lazy people.
I’ve discovered that I follow recipes best when I discover why ingredients are being used. For example, if I read my recipe above and saw honey and salt, I would immediately assume that the two would cancel each other out. Thus I wouldn’t see the point of either, and I’d skip both. Knowing that honey mollifies the acidity of the salsa, while salt highlights other flavors, gives me the reason I need to add these ingredients. Also once I know the reasons for ingredients, I can get to the fun part — substitutions and experiments. Obviously, though, I clearly do substitutions and experiments even if I don’t know why certain ingredients are included.