Weekend Cooking: Slow Cooker Chili

Weekend Cooking is hosted by Beth Fish Reads

I'm a hoarder when it comes to pins on Pinterest. One board that has a ton of pins is my Recipes to Try board and I very rarely try some of them. In my collection is a pin that links back to a blog that followed a year of cooking in a crockpot for a year (back in 2008).   Since then the blogger, Stephanie O'Dea, has turned her 365 days of cooking in a slow cooker into a book. I haven't looked at the book but the list of her recipes from that year has caught my attention and I've been wanting to try some.

It's Superbowl Sunday and there's the report of snow in our future. We're staying in but I wanted to cook something appropriate and the blog has a really easy chili recipe and honestly can you ever go wrong with chili.  So today I'm cooking Basic Chili CrockPot Recipe.

As is typical in my house, we made modifications to the recipe. Here's what I used:

--1 lb ground meat (I used 80/20)
--2 15.5 oz cans kidney beans
--2/3 cups frozen chopped onion
--8 garlic cloves, minced
--1 28oz can whole peeled plum tomatoes
--2 8oz can tomato sauce
--1 tbsp chili powder
--2 tsp cumin
--1 tsp black pepper
--1 tsp salt
--1/2 tsp tobasco sauce

I browned the meat with the onions in our French Oven. Then I added everything into the pot, gave it a stir and then placed it in the oven.  I could have easily used my slow cooker, but I didn't feel like pulling it out so I just set the oven on 200 (which is about the temp of low in a slow cooker) and placed the French Oven into the oven.  I pulled it out after about 3 hours to give it a stir and break up the tomatoes a bit. I stirred it again a few hours later.

Just before the game started I made a pot of rice and at kickoff we were settled in with yummy bowls of chili!