My cousin Gary, from Northern California, is visiting for the holidays. He’s retired now after a career at Hewlett-Packard, and divides his time between active membership in Mensa (maintaining his local Mensa website) and being a mentor to high school competitive robotics teams through First Robotics, a U.S.-based non-profit organization encouraging science, technology, engineering and math education. If you’re interested, there may be teams in your area who need mentors too, he has encouraged me to write. Go check it out. Gary was a programmer by profession, and gets a huge charge out of helping kids program a robot. Each season these high school teams must construct and program a robot to perform different actions on a tennis-court-sized field, and do it in a very tight time schedule. He also mentors teams around the country via email when they need help. And, he always helps me reconfigure electronic things around our house (we stayed up until 1 am last night while he moved a Tivo from one part of the house to another, and a cable box to my setup in my upstairs office.) Bless him!
As a bachelor, he’s never done all that much cooking, since he ate out a lot. But he just got tired of restaurant food. He’s somewhat famous in some of his social circles for his chili. Every time he serves it at potlucks or whatnot, he’s asked for the recipe. So given the opportunity, I asked him if he’d make his chili for our family for dinner. “Sure,” he said. So the ingredients were purchased and with me as his sous-chef, we made his chili.
So, how many chili recipes can one person have, I ask? Never too many is the right answer. Gary’s chili is delicious. A soupy kind of chili with all the usual things in it. But, there are two things that are a bit unique: (1) he adds big chunky slices of black olives to the mixture; and (2) he uses an unusual method for cooking the turkey. When he was making this chili one time, he had forgotten to defrost the ground turkey. So he put the frozen turkey chunk (the rectangular chunk, not the tube type) in a pot, added a bit of water, brought it to a bare boil, then allowed it to simmer/steam for about 15-20 minutes until the meat was no longer pink. But you DON’T STIR IT. So when it’s cooked through, it’s still sitting in this kind of loaf shape. He chops it a bit with a spatula to give off small bite-sized pieces. That way the turkey has a lot more form than little tiny crumbles you usually get cooking it like ground beef.
Add whatever you might prefer for seasonings – his calls for chili powder, cumin and cayenne. We added a bit more of the cumin to our batch, but the recipe you see below uses his normal seasonings. Note that there is no added salt. The juice from the olives generally contains plenty of sodium. It’s enough, actually. Thanks, cousin, for sharing your recipe. After cooking for several hours in my well-equipped kitchen he’s decided he needs to buy an alligator chopper (dices onions, peppers, etc.), a pair of onion goggles, a kitchen scraper (to pick up big piles of cut-up stuff), maybe a ceramic knife (I have just one of those), and also a new large pot of some kind. I’m going to recommend he look at buying one of the big Le Crueset pots. I gave him a short culinary lesson about garlic (removing the green sprout in the middle, and about how to smash it easily), about only cooking it a short time in the frying process, about different kinds of peppers (including chipotle and ancho), and why you’d use one type vs. another, and about letting soups/stews sit overnight to “meld” the flavors.
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Gary’s Ground Turkey Chili
Recipe: From my cousin Gary K.
Servings: 5
NOTES: I would serve this with a bowl of sour cream, cilantro and crushed tortilla chips as additional toppings. I also would add far more ground cumin to the chili, some ancho chile powder, plus about 2 tsp. of chipotle chile powder.
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 1/2 medium yellow onions — diced
1 whole Anaheim chili pepper — diced
1/2 jalapeno chile pepper — finely diced
1/2 green bell pepper — or red, or yellow
4 whole garlic cloves
1 can olives — undrained, thickly sliced (about 5+ ounces net weight)
28 ounces diced tomatoes — canned, not drained
16 ounces kidney beans, canned — drained, rinsed
3/4 teaspoon chili powder — or to taste
1/2 teaspoon cumin — or more to taste
1/4 teaspoon cayenne — or to taste
1 pound ground turkey (both dark and light) in loaf shape, not tube
TOPPINGS:
1/2 cup onions — minced
1 cup cheddar cheese, shredded
1. In a large skillet heat the olive oil.
2. Add the diced onions and saute for 5-10 minutes, until onion has become translucent.
3. While onions are cooking, prepare all the chiles and bell peppers. Add to the pan and continue cooking for another 5-10 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for about 1-2 minutes only.
4. Add the diced tomatoes (undrained) and kidney beans (drained). Stir well, then add the spices and the undrained olives and stir to combine. Bring to a boil, cover and allow to simmer.
5. In another pan bring a small amount of water to a simmer. Add the chunk of ground turkey, but DO NOT STIR. Bring to a simmer again, cover, and cook for about 10-15 minutes until the center is no longer pink. Chop up the turkey meat with a spatula, into smallish chunks and remove with a slotted spoon to the chili mixture. Discard the juice. (Or, you may add the turkey juice to the pot if it’s too thick.)
6. Simmer chili for 30-45 minutes. Taste for seasoning and serve with chopped onions and grated cheese.
Per Serving: 491 Calories; 22g Fat (39.2% calories from fat); 34g Protein; 43g Carbohydrate; 10g Dietary Fiber; 95mg Cholesterol; 884mg Sodium.
Toffeeapple
said on January 2nd, 2009:
It seems that you both learned something, isn’t it good to learn new things? I haven’t made a chili in ages, I really must do some cooking soon.
We did both learn something. It was fun cooking with my cousin. He’s a very witty guy – he loves it that I laugh at his jokes. . . Carolyn T