Cooking with Cast-Offs

First a few of my friends went Paleo.  Then my sister.  Then my mom.  In a nutshell (a Paleo approved nutshell that is), Paleo = eat meat, and fruit, veg, some nuts are okay but not all, no grains, no processed foods, and no foods a caveman wouldn’t eat.  Basically going back to a hunter-gatherer diet.  Both my sister and my mom are chronicling their Paleo recipes on their blogs (check them out!).  The food looks good but I agreed with my dad when he said a caveman wouldn’t use leftover pizza as a doorstop and that he hunts in the fridge and gathers what he finds.

I love carbs.  I’m a mac and cheese girl.  I love fresh baked bread so warm the butter melts.  (Why yes I did just make some today.  From my mother’s Molasses Oatmeal recipe no less.  After I got rid of the dead mouse in my kitchen.  Story for another time.  It was as gruesome as it sounds.)  So no, I can’t go Paleo.  Here’s another reason.  My mom would have no one to foist all her non-Paleo food on if I did.  

I dropped my daughter off at Grandma’s last week for my first day back to work.  As a New Year’s resolution mom was eating Paleo and had bags of non-Paleo food (canned beans, cereal, cake mix, canned soup, crackers, etc) to get rid of.  Pushing aside the thought that my mom’s purging her ‘unhealthy’ food by giving it to her daughter, I gladly took the free food.

Not to be outdone, I decided to chronicle my own recipe.  I made dinner that night with some of the ingredients.

So here is my very un-Paleo dinner.  It was yummy.

(Recipe basics from the back of the Campbell’s Cheddar Cheese soup can.)

Cheesy Chicken Chili 

1 tbsp. olive oil

1 lb chicken cut into cubes

1 large onion, chopped

1 large green pepper, diced

1 large red pepper, diced

1 can Campbell’s Condensed Cheddar Cheese soup, plus 1/2 can of water

(I usually just measure in my hand so I’m not sure the amounts of spices)

1/2 tsp. cumin

1/2 tsp. chili powder

1 can kidney beans

Farro (or other rice/grain) prepared according to package

Heat oil in skillet and cook chicken until browned.  Set aside.  Saute onion, peppers.  Stir in soup, water, spices.  Heat to a boil.  Add cooked chicken and beans.  Heat thoroughly and until chicken is cooked.  Serve over rice/grain.

The finished product.  My husband and I both really liked the Farro.  We thought it was much better than brown rice.

Using a whole bottle of Tobasco or, Spice Packet People

Part 1

A few months after I got married I felt intrepid enough to try my hand at making chili.  Cooking is not my specialty.  I can bake a delicious (some even say famous) chocolate chip cookie, but cooking always frazzled me, too many variables.  I lived at home during college and on the nights my mom didn’t cook my staple was Annie’s Mac and Cheese.  Some times I would saute onions and peppers, maybe heat up some leftover meat, to make the mac and cheese into more of a meal but that was the extent of my cooking abilities.  My dad was so worried about the comfort of my future husband he took it upon himself to teach me to cook.  Let’s just say it only happened once and it didn’t end well.  I was given boxes of Annie’s Mac at my bridal shower.  By more than one person.  Faith in my cooking abilities was low.

But I wanted to try chili.  Not just any chili, my mom’s chili.  The only chili I liked (or so I thought).  So I asked her for her recipe.  My first clue should have been the fact that I didn’t already have it.  I had photo-copied cards from her recipe box, at least all the ones I liked, before I moved out.  

My mom looked puzzled, my recipe?  

Yea, your chili is the only kind I really like.  

Oh, I just use the spice packet.

Crash. 

I timidly picked it up the next time I was at the grocery store.  McCormick.  Chili.  Hot.  There it was, what I thought was a ‘family recipe’, on the back of a spice packet.  Ready in 30 minutes.  Dreams of cookbooks filled with recipes passed down mother to daughter that would rival Martha Stewart and Paula Deen evaporated.  We were spice packet people.