Recipes

We all have a friend full of endless useless information much of which we assume they read or heard somewhere, some of which sometimes I think they just make up.  Either way – I love these friends and especially when I learned the story of the San Antonio chili queens, who according to wikipedia were brightly dressed Latino women in the 1880′s who “appeared at dusk, when they built charcoal or wood fires to reheat cauldrons of pre-cooked chili.”   I want to be a chili queen – talk about ladies ahead of their time in so many ways.   So that gets me to today’s recipe, beef chili made with beef brisket and kidney beans.  I served it with some simple corn and dill muffins, that I made by following the directions on store bought corn muffin mix and adding in 2-3 tablespoons of fresh dill.

Healthy Beef Chili
Servings: 10
Serving Size: about 3/4 of a cup
Nutritional Info: 216 calories, 4.2 g of fat, 14 g of carbohydrates, 4.7 g of fiber 28.3 of protein * 5 P+

Ingredients
2.5 lbs of beef brisket, trimmed of fat
2 large onions, chopped
non fat cooking spray
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 carrots, chopped
2 green bell peppers, chopped
1 jalapeno, seed and diced
1/4 cup chili powder
1 tbsp cumin
2 tbsp smoked paprika
1 tbsp oregano
1 tbsp red pepper flakes
16 oz of tomato sauce
1 1/4 cups non fat beef broth
3 tbsp apple cider vinegar
19 oz of kidney beans, rinsed and drained
Salt and pepper

Instructions
1.Spray a large dutch oven or soup pot with cooking spray and saute the onions, garlic, carrots, jalapeno for about ten minutes until the onions begin to become translucent.

2. Add the tomato sauce, apple cider vinegar, beef broth, cumin, chili powder, oregano, paprika, and red pepper flakes and bring to a boil. Turn down the heat to a simmer.

3. Season the brisket with salt and pepper. Add the beef brisket to the dutch oven and allow to simmer for between 3-3.5 hours until the brisket is fork tender.

4. Shred the brisket in the dutch oven and then add the kidney beans and green pepper. Allow to cook for additional 15 minutes. Enjoy.

Tip: You could easily make this chili using ground beef and significantly cut down the cooking time or throw everything into a crockpot and allow it to cook all day. It also freezes well.