...we celebrated by making an enormous pot of chili.
Don and Younger Daughter love chili. Older Daughter loathes it. I can take it or leave it, mostly take it. So with three out of four of us liking chili, I knew it would be an excellent addition to the pantry.
Don is the chili master in our house, so he hunted up a recipe that looked good and gave it a try.
He started with four pounds of dried beans -- two pounds each of pinto and navy.
He put them in a pot and filled it with water...
...and let them soak overnight.
The next day he drained the beans...
...and refilled the pot with fresh water.
He brought the beans to a boil on the stove...
...then set them on the woodstove to simmer for several hours...
...before draining them again.
This gave him about 11.5 lbs. of soaked beans.
So he defrosted five packages of ground beef (1.5 lbs each).
While the ground beef browned, he chopped a lot of onions.
Then to a larger pot he put the beans, ground beef, onions, tomatoes, and various spices.
And don't forget the chopped chilis!
A little bit of water...
...and a good mixing...
...and then he nested the post of chili in a larger pot, double-boiler style, to simmer gently all night long. By morning the chili was phenomenal. Don and Younger Daughter snitched bowls-full all day.
Now it was time to can it.
Scalded lids and gaskets, read to put on.
First batch in the canner. Since chili contains meat, I canned these for 75 minutes at 13 lbs. pressure (for our elevation). Actually I forgot and canned them for 90 minutes (necessary for quarts, not pints) but a few extra minutes in the canner certainly won't hurt.
End result: 23 pints of end-of-the-world chili.
I suppose we can bring this with us when we travel to a mountaintop in Mexico and wait for aliens to whisk us away or something.
