C is for: "Cooked All Day Chili" in 1 and a half hours.

made some awesome chili a few weeks back and i thought i would share. i do what the hubby calls adventure cooking, which pretty much means I work from the heart and soul. sometimes i use recipes for inspiration but mostly i just draw on experiences and trying to recreate things others have made.

i needed to do the meat separately but this actually worked out better than if i had mixed it it. i think one of the biggest rules of cooking is to cook each ingredient how it likes to be cooked. this means adding ingredients at the right time and sometimes cooking a bunch of stuff separately and adding them together near the end.

this is a stewed chicken. i took 6 thighs (bone in, never without or you miss all the flavor) I pulled the majority of the skin off, dropped them in a pot, added a bunch of salt and covered with water. After about 15 mins in i added stewed tomatoes with some of their juice (not all of it because you want most of the water to boil off. I then added freshly toasted and ground cumin and coriander. If you've never used these spices straight from the oven and freshly ground you're really missing out, I think they are actually the key to this entire dish.

while the chicken was cooking I took 4 different types of peppers, chopped them and got them sauteing with garlic and oil.here are the spices. so pretty.

To the peppers I added pototes, frozen corn, black and red beans from a can (not the best i know) and some stewed tomatoes.
the chicken finished like this.
i put fresh tomatoes, cilantro, sour cream and avocados out for garnish and served with fresh made corn bread. i forgot to take a picture of the plate. sorry. the guests i had loved it hence the name as most thought i must have had it cooking all day to get such flavor.

i hope you are inspired to do some adventure cooking yourself!