Wednesday in the Kitchen

More snow today. Luckily, the grocery store was open, so I decided to get after it in the kitchen. I made chili, chocolate chip cookies, and bought the ingredients for Red Lobster's famed cheddar bay biscuits. If you've never had them before, the recipe is on the internet. The recipe for the chili, however, came from my old man, who has become quite the accomplished chef over the past few years. I've tweaked it just enough that I don't think he'll mind me posting it on the internet.

1. The Don's Chili

Ingredients:
- 2 large cans of tomato sauce
- 1 large can of crushed tomatoes
- 2 boxes of Rice a Roni long grain wild rice
- 1.5 to 2 pounds of ground beef
- 3 packs of chili mix
- Oregano
- 4-5 jalapeno peppers
- 3-4 hot red cherry peppers
- 2 tablespoons of brown sugar
- Tabasco
*And the secret ingredient/ special addition: Bacon (8 slices in this case)

- Combine the tomato sauce, crushed tomatoes, oregano, brown sugar, and two chili mixes in a large pot and cook over high heat.
- While this is going on, A. cook the ground beef in a separate pan (I added a pouch of chili mix and water to help in the browning), B. cook the rice in a separate pan/ pot (once again, add water. And butter if you'd like), C. fry the bacon in a separate pan until it is so crisp that you could use it as a baseball bat.
- Once the sauce is sufficiently heated, pour the ground beef and the rice into the tomato mix and stir. Break the bacon into small pieces and drop that in as well. Continue to let the mix simmer over medium heat.
- At this point, I proceeded to add enough jalapenos and red cherry peppers to kill a horse, as well as 3/4 of a bottle of Tabasco. Some like it hot. And hot it was. I let the final product simmer so the flavors could all mesh together, and then I crushed a bowl for dinner.

This was my first time making this chili, and while it wasn't perfect, it was really good. I'll make a few tweaks for next time, and if you make it on your own, feel free to add/ subtract ingredients as well.


2. The chocolate chip cookies were nothing special either. I just got a recipe off of google and made it happen. One thing I did do was add about 3x the recommended amount of chocolate chips, and also added a small bag of m&m's. Nothing worse than chocolate chip cookies with too much cookie and not enough chocolate chip. They turned out pretty good.
http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/best-chocolate-chip-cookies/Detail.aspx

**Two quick additions:
1. Once you've finished making the dough for these cookies, put the whole big ball in the freezer for 20-30 minutes. I'm not sure why you do this, but my mom always did and her chocolate chip cookies are out of this world.
2. Sprinkle some salt on the baking sheet before you put the cookies on. Some of this salt will stick to the bottoms of the cookies. I think it may prevent sticking, but the main reason I did it is because the warm chocolate chip cookies at Max & Erma's Restaurants have a few grains of salt on the underside of each cookie, and it really enhances the taste. Don't ask me how or why.