My chili

So I finally got around to making chili. I looked for a recipe, and I found this one from Texas Monthly. As usual, I didn't follow it exactly, but pretty close. The biggest difference was I only cooked half of the recipe.

Now that I've got some experience under my belt, I have ideas about how my second time should go. Since this is more extreme experimentation, I'm only making 1/6th of the recipe. So here is what I'm going with:

2 dried ancho chiles, stems removed
1 dried pasilla chile, stem removed
1 dried chipotle chile, stem removed
1 dried cascabel chile, stem removed
1 jalapeño 
2 cups chicken stock
1 pound beef chuck
1/3 large onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 roma tomato, diced
1/2 tablespoons cumin
1/2 teaspoon coriander
1 teaspoon oregano
1/2 teaspoon unsweetened cocoa
1 teaspoon sweet Hungarian paprika
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/4 teaspoon sugar
dash of cloves
salt to taste (I used a teaspoon, that was probably a bit too much)

Basically what I did is take all of the chiles and put them in a pot with the chicken stock on medium heat. Then I took the ground chuck, onion and garlic and cooked them on medium heat in a skillet. Once the ground beef browned, I took the broth with the chiles and put it in a blender and blended it until the chiles were broken up. Then I put the mixture back in the pot, added the beef mixture, added the tomato, and then the spices.

And I know that this is going to be heresy for some people, but I've been trying to lose weight, and the "stay at home" order hasn't been helping at all. So I cut the ground beef by half and replaced it with mushrooms. We'll see how it goes.

How to cook beans

When I moved back to Houston last year, I continued my practice of cooking new things. I decided to try cooking beans instead of buying them from the can. I'd heard different ways to cook beans, but I wasn't sure which was right. I went to the Internet and found an article by Katherine Sacks on Epicurious entitled Epicurious's Myth-Busting Guide to Cooking Beans. I used that for cooking pintos twice last year. Hopefully the article will serve me well again.
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I initially posted that I'd gotten interested in lima beans after learning that they have the most protein of all the vegetables. Then I learned that wasn't true! I was comparing the nutrition information on the lima beans with a package of pinto beans I had. Pinto beans have more protein. Then I looked at a package of lentils. They have even more protein than pinto beans. I then found a page showing the top ten beans ranked by protein, and it puts lima beans at the end of the list. Number one is soybeans. Interestingly enough, that page on the same website as the erroneous page.