Hot Biscuits and Chili

A friend of mine is American.  Her fav recipes from being a kid wasn’t exactly a main dish; it was her mother’s biscuits. I asked her what she normally had them with and she said, “I guess they’d go well with my Dad’s chili.” So I snagged that recipe as well.   Biscuits make me think of the southern states, probably erroneously. But either way, they weren’t something we ever had on my kitchen table growing up, but I figured they had to be simple enough. And they are.

Let’s start with the chili though:

Ingredients

5 Onions
1 Head of Garlic
5 Shallots
1lb Ground Beef
1/2 lb Ground Pork
5 Medium-sized Carrots, chopped
6 Stalks of Celery, chopped
3 Peppers, red, yellow and orange, chopped
2 Cans Whole Tomatoes
1 Can Black Beans
Chili Powder to taste

Get a few tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil heated up in a soup pot.

Chop 5 yellow onions, 5 shallots, a head of garlic roughly. throw them into the pot and turn the heat down to medium and saute until everything is translucent, but not golden.

Add a pound of medium ground beef and a half a pound of pork. Make sure to break up the meat while it’s cooking. Add a 1/2 teaspoon of Sea Salt and crack some pepper over the meat. I find the chili tastes the best when the meat is as broken up as possible.

Keep cooking the meat and the onions to make sure the flavours begin to meld. After about 10 minutes, add the peeled and chopped carrots & celery and let cook for another ten minutes. Dice up 3 peppers, cored and seeded, and throw them in. Let it cook for another 10.

If you want to, you can chop up some potatoes and throw them in.

Add in two cans of whole tomatoes and one can of chopped tomatoes.

Stir it up and let simmer for a few minutes before adding a can of black or red kidney beans.

Keep the heat on low to medium, keep stirring and let simmer for 2 hours or so.

You can serve immediately, with some cheddar grated over it or, ideally, remove from heat and let it cool, then refrigerate overnight.

Biscuits

2 1/2 Cups Flour

2 1/2 tsps Baking Powder

1/2 tsp salt

1 tbsp sugar

1/2 sticks of cold butter

3/4 cup milk

1 egg

 

Preheat to 400

mix dry ingredients together thoroughly
add butter cut and cold
use pastry blender to cut butter into dry ingredients until it looks all crumbly.
Add milk or butter milk and beaten egg and mix it up into a big sticky, gooey ball of dough

Roll the dough out to about 1, 1-1/2 inches thick and use a round cookie cutter, about 3 inches across to cut the dough

Brush w either buttermilk or 1 egg beaten mixed w 1 tbsp milk and place on a cookie sheet lined with parchment

Bake for 10-15 minutes, until the biscuits are nice and golden brown on top, or a toothpick can come out clean when they’re pricked. When you take them out of the oven, cool them on a wire rack.

These can be rewarmed in the oven wrapped in aluminum foil and sprinkled w a touch of water. Rip them open and cover them butter before eating.