Guest article by Tyler

Chili is a dish made from chiles that is wonderful to eat when you are chilly.

Chili is one of those dishes that nobody ever agrees on how to cook, so if you’ve ever cooked chili before you are guaranteed to hate this post and be very angry at me for all the mortal sins against southwestern gastronomy that I surely have committed in your eyes.

The reason nobody agrees how to cook it is because it is a dish of low origins. Originally, chili was a Mexican stew made from whatever meat was available, and heavily spiced with local hot chiles to hide the taste of the often spoiled meat. These days, thanks to the wonders of refrigeration, we no longer have to worry about covering up rancid flavors, but the spiciness of the chile peppers is still something that can be appreciated on its own merits.

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In the short lull between the end of October and mid November, I like to have a break from the kitchen to recoup. That means no eight hour kitchen days for at least one week. So I threw together a chimichurri in 10 minutes, marinaded thinly sliced steak overnight, and spent 15 minutes pulling together a plate of fried sweet onions and bell peppers, seared mushrooms with truffle oil, and steak finished on the cast iron griddle. Super easy.

There’s really no single recipe for chimichurri. It can be done with red wine vinegar or white wine vinegar, cilantro or no cilantro, lemon juice or lime juice, olive oil or vegetable oil, etc. Typically there are red pepper flakes, but even that can be substituted out for another spicy ingredient.

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Chile Verde is a dish straddling the border between Mexico and the United States. It can be made with a distinctively Tex-Mex flair, served in burritos, or created as a rich broth for plain steamed rice called morisqueta. Even wilder variations of chile verde call for paprika, cinnamon, and yellow bell peppers or chicken instead of pork. To complicate matters further, there is another eerily similar dish, called Chilayo, which Diana Kennedy attributes to the Colima region of Mexico in her book The Art of Mexican Cooking. So given all this, what exactly is chile verde?

Well I can’t tell you what chile verde should be, because anything I say could be contradicted by at least ten Mexican grandmothers or world-class competitors in chili cook-offs (all of whom can hardly agree with each other). However, I can tell you all about my chile verde, which is a rather simple blend of common sense and personal preference.

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I’ve seen a wide swath of “BBQ sauces"—everything from thin vinegar basting mops to thick soy-based Asian mixtures. But when I think of BBQ sauce, and what most people think of when you say BBQ sauce, is a combination of the holy trinity: vinegar, tomato, and molasses. BBQ sauce of this category isn’t intended to penetrate the meat, and it should never be used to baste meat exposed directly to heat for long periods of time (unless you like eating carbon). The sugar content, however, makes the sauce a prime candidate for caramelization. Caramelization is the process whereby finger-licking good BBQ sauce gets stuck to your meat. Sticky sauce may be messy, but it’s preferable to having the sauce slide off entirely while you’re trying to eat a hunky rack of ribs.

So what’s the recipe for BBQ sauce? Well, the answer is there is no single recipe, even if we narrow down our options to those that include The Three Main Ingredients. Some people like it tangy (more vinegar). Some people like it sweet. Some people like it hot. Some people like it smoky and with a tasty bite of booze. Depending on what you like, you’ll have to adjust the amount of sweet, tangy, hot, smoky, and bitter components in your recipe.

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Bobby really delivers two more winners with his Bulgur Salad and Tandoori Spiced Chicken Breasts with Grilled Tomato Jam and Herbed Yogurt. The bulgur salad packed a punch with the acidity of lime juice and the brightness of the serrano chile; the grilled tomato jam with balsamic vinegar and saffron took an ordinary dish to above-ordinary levels. The only real flaws were ones of my own making:

• Use canola oil or a good (but not extra virgin) olive oil! The olive oil should not impart much flavor to the dish.
• Store the dressing in a separate bottle and apply as necessary. Do not drizzle all the dressing over the bulgur salad or you will turn a fluffy bulgur salad with crisp fresh veggies into a soggy mess.
• I doubled the tandoori spices, which turned out to be a mistake. Way too much for 4 lbs of chicken!

2 poblano chiles
2 anaheim chiles
4 sesame seed buns
4 slices of provolone cheese
1.32 lbs 82% lean ground beef formed into 4 patties, with a small indentation in the middle of each patty
kosher salt
garlic powder
onion powder
fresh black pepper

The Procedure:

1. Season the patties with salt, pepper, onion powder, and garlic powder to taste.

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Fresh lemongrass stalks at the farmer’s market inspired this attempt at a classic Asian dish. I used Charles Phan’s recipe on Food and Wine as a springboard for whipping together my own creation, which was scaled up and done more or less by taste rather than with measuring instruments.

The Procedure:

1. Wash 4 lbs of chicken breast in cold water, then pat completely dry. Cut chicken into small bite size pieces. Put peanut oil in the Calphalon Everyday Pan and heat until ready to fry. (Heat Setting: 8 ) Then add enough chicken to cover the bottom-but no more-and season with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper. Cover the pan for a few minutes to minimize splatter. Use a plastic spatula to scrape the chicken from the bottom, then switch to your slotted spoon and remove the chicken from the pan. Continue frying the rest of the chicken in batches, being sure to add peanut oil as necessary to prevent excessive sticking. Do not clean the pan between batches!

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This recipe from Diary of a Foodie is an excellent starting point for a mole. I followed the instructions with a few important changes:

1. It was impossible to obtain the prized (and rare) chilhuacle negro. As a substitution, I used pasilla negro chiles.
2. I used ancho chiles (essentially dried poblanos) instead of mulatto chiles, also known as ancho negro.
3. The variety of chipotle chile to be used was not specified in the original recipe, but I used morita chipotles.
4. Since I used pasilla negros in place of the chilhuacle negros, I did not follow the directions, which called for an additional four pasilla chiles.

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