My Dad's Chili

Some friends at work put together a little chili contest. I made the chili I learned from my Dad. This is such a versatile recipe. In its basic form, it is stewed tomatoes, kidney beans, ground meat and chili seasoning package. I inherited this base class to build the public Chile Chili. The name is to highlight the extra chilies used in the recipe. (Alton Brown had a terrific Good Eats episode on chiles).

Here is the recipe I used for the contest

2 cans kidney beans, not drained
1 can garbanzo beans, drained because the beans were soaked in some yucky looking oil
1 can black beans, drained because I didn’t want the black to discolor my beautiful red
5 cans stewed tomatoes, but I could have added two more. Add more to make it soupier.
2 packages chili seasoning

1 lb ground turkey
Black pepper, coarse

Olive oil
1 chopped small onion
4 sausage links. I cut two links into very thin disc. The other two I removed the skin and chopped it up. We bought "Habanero & Green Chile" from Aidells
3 cloves pressed garlic
1 can green chilies

Peanut butter
Saltine crackers

Add all the cans to the crock pot. Stir in the seasoning packages.

Cook the turkey with the pepper and chop it into little yummy pieces. Drain any remaining fat, but since it is turkey there probably won’t be very much. I actually let the fat boil out. Stir the turkey into the crock.

Use some olive oil and cook the onion until clear (about 4 minutes). Add the sausage and cook through. Make sure the sausage is cooked before continuing. Add the garlic and chilies. Cook through. I let it go for quite awhile to work out the water from the chilies, also letting some of the chilies darken. Stir the sausage mix into the crock.

Last step: cook it! As you can see, I use a crock pot to slow cook this object. I started it Wednesday morning on low and turned it off after work. Now you can eat it. I recommend sampling it through out the day because you taste the flavor change. When I eat my chili, I put peanut butter on a bunch of crackers and then mix it into my bowl of chili. Mmmmm. That is good eats.

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Better Browser --> Firefox

I have made the switch. Internet Explorer is NOT my browser. I use Firefox exclusively. You might ask why. It is because Firefox offers me more things that make my Internet usage more enjoyable and convenient.

Built In

Let's get specific. There are many natural elements of Firefox that I really like. Here are my top features of Firefox.
  • Firefox uses tabbed browsing. If I am surfing several different web sites, I can have one Firefox open and it will have a tabbed list of different sites for which I am viewing.
  • Inline text searches. If I want to search for some text on a web page, I can press Ctrl+F and type my search. As my typed letters are found, they are highlighted on the screen
  • Built in search window. To the right of my address bar, is a text box for me to enter search criteria for various popular search engines. You might say "big deal", but look at the list of search engines available to me.
  • Color-code source view. Web page's source is displayed in a nice color-coded fashion. The same great inline text searching applies to the source code, too.

Extensions

Firefox is extremely flexible thanks to the vast community of developers who write extensions to Firefox. These extensions make using the browser even better. Below is a list of my favorite extensions.

Themes

Firefox also uses themes which allows the browser to look completely different with different color schemes and buttons. This is purely aesthetic, but beauty and function go hand in hand when it comes to such a common tool as the Internet browser. Here are my favorite themes.


Make the Plunge

You can get your FREE Firefox at www.getfirefox.com. I hope you make the move soon.

If you are a developer using Visual Studio, you can make Firefox your default browser for debugging. Scott Gu wrote "Changing the default browser used in VS 2005 and Visual Web Developer"

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Brunch Enchiladas

Les and I made these for our Sunday school class.

Before



After




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Extra Apples = Crumble Time

We had extra apples, so, like every family in America, I'm sure, I made apple crumble with the kids.




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Pâte à choux

Thanks again to Alton Brown and his show Good Eats for a new recipe: pâte à choux. So it is a fancy name for a yummy pastry also known as cream puffs and eclairs. In this photo spree, you'll see pictures of funnel cake. It was pretty good - I still need to polish this recipe a bit for my kitchen. I think it was a success, because my Sunday School class and kids devoured them.

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Can you hear it sizzling in the oil?
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Here is the whole operation laid out.
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This is a special funnel cake / cream puff mutant. Elijah asked me to make this one. It was fried and then I injected chocolate into it. To top it off, I add more chocolate for a hat.

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