Chili Con Kanga With Avocado, Lime and Coriander Salsa

by Linda on April 27, 2012

Sadly this isn’t one of my better examples of photography! I’ve been waiting all year to post this recipe.  Chili con Kanga is good on its own, but this time of year there is a little window of time when avocados, limes and coriander are all in season together, and the salsa with it makes it sensational.

I always make a great big pot of this when I make it, and we have it for dinners and lunches several times.  It will serve six or eight people for dinner easily, or you can freeze it or keep it in the fridge for several meals.  Or, you can halve the recipe.

Less red meat and more vegetables is a good idea, for health, environment, and hip pocket reasons.  And less factory farmed meat and more wild harvested, free range, organic meat is a good idea for the same reasons.  This combines both.

The Recipe:

Cook 400 grams dry beans till they are soft.  I soak them first and use a pressure cooker so they cook quickly.  The post about Bean Basics has my basic bean cooking method.  I don’t think it matters what kind.  They all add a different character to the dish, but they all seem to be good in their own way.

Brown 1 kg kangaroo mince in a little olive oil in a heavy pan.

In a big pot, saute together:

  • 4 onions (chopped)
  • 6 garlic (chopped)
  • 6 chilis (more or less, depending on how hot the chilis are and how hot you like it)
  • 3 teaspoons cumin seeds
  • 2 teaspoons smoky paprika
  • 1 capsicum (chopped)
  • 6 carrots (chopped)

Add the browned kangaroo mince and the beans, along with:

  • 1 heaped tablespoon chopped fresh oregano (or a good teaspoon of dried)
  • 5 fresh bay leaves
  • 1 kilogram chopped tomatoes  (or a big jar of passata)
  • 2 big tablespoons tomato paste (leave out if you use passata)
  • 1 dessertspoon treacle (or brown sugar)
  • 2 cups of water
  • a good grinding of black pepper, and salt to taste

Simmer for half an hour or so until it reaches the right consistency.

Avocado, Lime and Coriander Salsa

Mash together:

  • An avocado
  • Juice of a lime
  • a big handful of coriander leaves, chopped fine
  • salt to taste

Serve the chili in bowls topped with a good dollop of avocado salsa, and, if you like, some warm tortillas to mop up with.

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Chili Beans With A Secret Ingredient

by Linda on February 21, 2012

My partner is a chili fiend.  He would eat chili beans for every meal if he could. We compromise. But I do make chili beans quite a lot. He’s a big bloke and he needs a lot of fuel. But, like me, he alternates between being very physically active and spending too much time doing sitting work. So the perfect fuel is very filling but low calorie, low GI, high protein and high nutrient value.  Pretty much the kind of food that is good for all of us.

This time of year he’s in luck. I have chilis and more chilis in the garden, and plenty of mature beans. I dry and store some for winter – they’re a great easy-store crop. But fresh mature beans are one of those foods that only gardeners get to really appreciate. Commercially, you only have a choice between green beans or dried beans.

If you don’t have mature beans in the garden, you can use dried beans for this. You just need to think of it a half day in advance to allow for soaking time. And if you use mild chilis, it’s like a home-made healthy version of baked beans.

The Recipe

Makes 4 decent sized serves. It’s good on its own, or with brown rice or some other grain dish to make a complete protein. Makes great leftovers.

You need 2 cups of cooked beans for this recipe.  Mature beans, shelled, yield about the same cooked as raw, so you need 2 cups of fresh shelled beans. Dried beans swell to about double their size, so one cup of dried beans, soaked overnight or for the day.

All beans, fresh or dried, need soaking or boiling before cooking, and the first batch of water thrown away. They have a kind of complex, indigestible sugar called  oligosaccharide in their skin. It’s not dangerous, just fart producing, and it can give some people uncomfortable wind. Oligosaccharides are only in the skin and they are water soluble, so soaking gets rid of them.  With my fresh beans, I bring them to the boil, drain, replace the water, then pressure cook for 8 to 10 minutes. With dried beans, I just throw out the soaking water and pressure cook for around half an hour or simmer for an hour or so.

In a large pot, in a little olive oil, sauté

  • 1 diced onion
  • 1 teaspoon of cumin
  • 1 teaspoon of mustard seeds

Cook till the onion is soft and the seeds are popping, then add

  • 1 diced capsicum
  • 3 cloves of garlic
  • 3 chilis (or to taste, depending on how hot your chilis are and how hot you like it, but beans mellow chili more than you would think)
Cook for a few minutes more, then add
  • 2 cups of cooked beans
  • salt
  • 600 grams of diced tomatoes, or a jar of passata
  • 1 teaspoon of treacle
  • 2 teaspoons of cocoa powder

The cocoa powder is the secret ingredient. It adds a bit of richness and balances up the sweet and acid. It’s not so weird – Mexicans use cocoa in savory dishes a lot.

You may need to add a little water, depending on your tomatoes. Simmer for at least 15 minutes and serve in a bowl on its own, or over rice, or in a tortilla.

Did you do the Tuesday Night Vego Challenge this week? Links welcome.

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Tamarillo and Chili Sauce

by Linda on February 17, 2012

I have chilis, lots of chilis, and not enough lemons ripe yet to make Chili Jam.  I’ve made some Pickled Chilis so as to have some chilis for curries and spicing up winter dishes, but I’ve still got chilis. And this year, the tamarillos have been really prolific.

I’m not a big preserve maker, nor do I freeze vegetables. I sun-dry tomatoes and make passata if I have enough, but I am lucky enough to live in a climate where,  if I plant sequentially and we eat seasonally, we can eat fresh all year. So preserves tend to just sit on the shelf looking decorative.

So if I make preserves, it’s not to preserve things but because the result is worth making all of its own account and not just to keep something for later.

The Recipe:

This recipe made these four jars – about 1.4 kg altogether.

The first thing to do is de-seed your chilis. I used about 40 medium sized chilis, but the recipe is forgiving. My chilis are medium-hot, and 40 sounds like a lot, but the resulting sauce is pleasantly spicy, not blast your socks off hot.  To de-seed them, chop the tops off  and swivel the point of a fine knife blade round inside them to loosen the seeds.  Use gloves or really, really remember not to touch your eyes for hours afterwards! Rinse under running water to remove most of the seeds.  There is no need to be very diligent about this. The more seeds you miss though, the hotter the resulting sauce will be.

I use a blender to make quick work of finely chopping the deseeded chilis, along with

  • 1½ cups of malt vinegar
  • 1 dessertspoon of salt
  • 1 cup of raw sugar
  • 3 or 4 cloves of garlic
  • a thumb of ginger, peeled
  • a thumb of fresh turmeric (or a teaspoon of dried)

Many metals will react with acid fruit and vinegar, so use a stainless steel or enamel pot.

Simmer the chili-vinegar-sugar mix with the flesh from 15 tamarillos (leave them chunky – just halve them and scoop out the flesh with a spoon), until the sauce has reduced and gone a bit syrupy - about 40 minutes.

While the sauce is cooking, put your jars and their lids on to boil for 10 minutes or pressure cook for 5 minutes to sterilize them. I just recycle any jars of the kind that the lid pops when you open them.

Ladle the hot sauce into hot sterilized jars. Screw the sterilized lid onto the jar. As the jar cools, the middle of the lid should pop in, showing that you have an airtight seal.  Wait until the jars are cool to wash the outside (cool water on hot jars will crack them).

The sauce will keep for several weeks in the fridge, so any that doesn’t completely fill a jar can be eaten first. It’s great with meat,  anything with cheese, lots of kinds of vegetable patties or fritters, on sandwiches ….

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Sweet and Spicy Snake Beans

January 31, 2012

The  Tuesday Night Vego Challenge this week had to feature snake beans. Now I have them coming on, the poor old Blue Lakes and Purple Kings have dropped right out of favour, left to mature for seed for storing. Snake beans are more tropical than most bean varieties, adapted to the tropical summer monsoon belt.  They like [...]

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The Breakfast Challenge – Huevos Diablos (Devil’s Eggs)

December 28, 2011

I wasn’t going to post until the new year, but my love for patterns got in the way, and it seemed a pity not to make it a clean sweep – a Breakfast Challenge recipe for every week of the year.  And this is one I’ve been waiting all year to get to! It is [...]

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Tofu and Winter Vegetable Lunchbox

August 23, 2011

My partner’s favourite lunch is microwaved tofu and vegetables with chili (he’s a chili fiend).  I’m not a huge fan of either tofu or microwaves, but hey, I’m not purist. It’s mostly garden vegetables, and I am a huge fan of them! I’m not a huge fan of tofu because soy beans contain a number [...]

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Moroccan Style Spiced Kangaroo Mince

April 19, 2011

We hosted a meeting over dinner at our place, which meant 10 people for a casual dinner on a weeknight.  I wanted to use kangaroo – kangaroo is my red meat of choice, for a whole heap of reasons – ethical, ecological, nutritional, and not least economic. Kangaroo mince is less than $7 a kilo, beef [...]

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The Breakfast Challenge – Sweet Corn, Chili and Lime Pikelets

April 8, 2011

I saw an episode of Jamie Oliver’s American Food Revolution, where they were teaching people to cook corn on the cob with chili and lime.  The flavour combination inspired these.  They work really well. Sweet corn and lime basil are both in season in my garden and I’m just starting to pick the first of [...]

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Kangaroo Stuffed Peppers

March 28, 2011

Capsicums and chilis are right in season now and I’m harvesting both.  These ones are a banana pepper, and they’re either a very mild, sweet chili or a  capsicum with a bit of spiciness, depending on how you look at it.  They’re slightly laborious to stuff – the larger more common bell peppers would be [...]

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