Slow-cooker chili

Holy cow, I've finally done it! The worst food photo ever seen by human eyes!

Hearty, filling and warm, this is the easiest thing to make in the world. All you need is a few ingredients, a slow cooker, 15 minutes to prep the stuff and 6 hours to let it cook by itself. And you will be happy. SO HAPPY.

Ingredients
2 tbsp chili powder (make your own or buy it ready-made. I suspect the ready-made stuff is full of food colouring and stuff, though)
1 large can (about 3 cups) tomato sauce
1 bay leaf
1 can kidney beans, or whatever beans you like. Rinsed and drained
1 onion, diced
1 lb meat. I used ground pork but you can use whatever you like.
salt to taste
hot sauce/peppers
Optional: any diced up veggies.

Let's do it!
Put your slow cooker to medium and throw in the chili powder, tomato sauce, bay leaf and beans. Stir it together.

In a pan, saute the onions in a bit of oil until they're translucent. Transfer to the slow cooker.

In the same pan, brown the meat and transfer to the slow cooker (drain it out first if you don't like fat in your food.)

This is a good time to add any other veggies you want to put in there. Chili is a great way to use up leftover veggies or meat provided they don't have a ton of other spices/flavours in them.

Let it cook while you do something else for a few hours. You know, like your job.

Taste, add salt. This recipe isn't very spicy since I made it with my entire family in mind. If you like spicy, you can add some fresh chili peppers when you're putting everything in the slow cooker.

Less lazy Vietnamese Sub

As promised, here is a recipe for a less-lazy Vietnamese sub, otherwise known as Banh Mi. If you live in a city that has Banh Mi, you are very lucky. When I was a kid, my mom used to be able to get them for a dollar each from Chinatown. She would buy them by the grocery bag full so that my brother and I could stuff our little faces when we got home from school. From my understanding as a non-Vietnamese face-stuffer, it seems that these subs have a few key ingredients: Vietnamese-style bun made with both wheat and rice flour, liver pate, mayonnaise, protein of some sort, pickled vegetables and fresh cilantro You can also hit it with some sriracha if you like it spicy.

I've decided to make mine with roasted pork belly as the protein.

Ingredients
1 Vietnamese bun
1 heaping teaspoon of liverwurst (the only pate in the store without dairy)
1 heaping teaspoon of mayonnaise
3 slices of pork belly (recipe to follow)
some pickled daikon and carrot
handful of fresh cilantro

Pork belly ingredients: 
a piece of raw pork belly that was maybe 12" x 6"
1 tbsp 5 spice powder
1/2 tsp salt

Let's do it!
Pork belly takes about an hour and a half - two hours to cook. It's worth it.

Take the pork belly, rinse and dry it with paper towel. Cut off some of the fat from the bottom (meat side) if you want. There is a ton of fat on the skin side, but we need it.

With a sharp knife, score the skin in a 1" criss crossed pattern, but don't cut into the meat. Make sure your knife is sharp, you probably want to use a chef's knife, not a serrated one. This is a really annoying process, but necessary if you don't want a big piece of hardened skin you can't eat. Mix together the salt and spice powder, then rub into the meat.. all around it, into the crevices... Just get it in there. Place the meat on a pan and roast in the toaster oven (or oven). If you have the option, set it on broil (only the top burner going) at 400ºF. Roast for one hour. After one hour, check with an instant read thermometer to see if the meat is at 160ºF. If not, roast it for another 30 minutes at 350ºF. Keep doing this until it reads 160ºF.

Let it cool on the counter, then cut it into slices.

Lunch it up!

Cut the bun in half and take some of the inside bread out to make more room for deliciousness. Spread pate on one side, mayo on the other. Fill with cilantro and wrap up in foil. Put the pickled daikon and carrot into an airtight container. Put the pork in another container. I like to heat up the pork a bit before putting it in the sandwich. By all means, you can put this all together if you like, but I sort of like to keep things separate. I also only made pickled daikon because I'm not a huge fan of pickled carrots.

Enjoy!

Robert Rodriguez's Puerco Pibil

I saw this video a while back (warning: not safe for work/children) and wanted to make it. It looked simple enough and I had pretty good results, though I think I might tweak the recipe the next time around. Here is the recipe with my tweaks.

Ingredients
5 pounds pork butt, cut into 2 inch cubes
1/2 cup orange juice
1/2 cup vinegar
1 tablespoons salt (original recipe says two)
8 cloves garlic
2 habanero peppers, chopped (seeded as well, if you're a wuss)
juice of 5 lemons
1 tablespoon tequila

Annatto paste, in a coffee grinder finely grind:
5 tbsp annatto seeds
2 tsp cumin
1 tbsp black peppercorns
8 pieces allspice (or 1/2 tsp ground)
1/2 tsp cloves

Banana leaves

Let's do it!
Make the annatto paste and put in a blender with OJ, vinegar, salt, garlic, tequila, and peppers. This is your marinade.

Chop up the pork butt into 2 inch cubes and place in a ziploc bag. If there's a big bone in it, keep it, that's good for flavour. Add the marinade and let it sit in the fridge for a few hours.

Set your oven to 325ºF. Add the lemon juice (keep the seeds out!) to the marinade. Take a nice deep oven-safe dish, preferably one with a lid. Make sure the dish holds a volume at least 20% more than that of the pork right now, as there's going to be a ton of liquid released. Line with some banana leaves, and line it in a way so that you can fold the leaves over the meat when you put the meat in. Pour in the meat, bone and marinade, cover with the banana leaf flaps and put the cover on, or cover tightly with tin foil.

Let it cook in the oven for at least 4 hours, according to the recipe. Something may be wrong with my oven, because it took more like 9 hours to cook. The dish is ready when the meat is nice and soft.

That's it! Serve over rice!

Chinese-style pork, broccoli and brown rice with pickled cucumbers

I’ve sort of been craving Cantonese pork ribs lately, but really didn’t want to mess with the bones at work, so I went with pork chops. Sorry about the grossness of the picture. It’s biking season and everything sort of got bashed around.

Chinese-style pork
Ingredients:
2 pork chops, sliced into strips
1 tbsp dark soy sauce
1 tbsp light soy sauce
1 tsp sugar
½ tbsp cooking sherry/rice wine (you can find this in Asian grocery stores)
a small splash of sesame oil
1 tsp hoisin sauce
1 tbsp cornstarch mixed in water for later

Let’s do it!
Mix all the sauces and sugar together and taste. Adjust for sweetness/saltiness. It’s okay if it’s pretty salty, it will be mixing in with pork, and later rice.

Marinate the pork while you’re making the broccoli.

Heat a pan/wok, pour in some oil and fry the pork and marinade until cooked. Add in the cornstarch and water at the end. Stir until thick. That’s it.

Stir-fried broccoli with garlic and ginger
Ingredients:
1 head broccoli, rinsed
3 cloves garlic, sliced thinly
½ inch piece of ginger, peeled and sliced into matchsticks
salt

Let’s do it!
Chop up the broccoli: peel the thick skin off the stalk, and cut the bottom of the stalk off. Slice the stalk into thin rounds until you get to the florets. Take the florets apart with your hands (you will lose less of them this way) for any florets with thick stalks, slice only the stalk, then pull it apart with your hands.

Heat up a wok with some oil. When the oil is shimmery, add the garlic and ginger. Fry until golden. Move it around a lot, or it will burn. Add the broccoli and stir around, flipping them. Add ¼ cup of water and cover, letting it steam for maybe 10 minutes until dark. That’s it.

Pickled cucumber
Ingredients:
1 cucumber, seeded and sliced thinly
2 tbsp vinegar
1 tbsp water
1 tsp sugar
dash of salt

Let’s do it!
Mix all this stuff together and let marinate for at least an hour.

Lunch it up!
Put the pork and broccoli on a bed of brown rice in a microwavable container. If you like to keep things separate, then do so, but I would warn against heating stuff up in plastic containers. If you're a guy, you'll get boobs. If you're a girl, you'll get an extra uterus.

Keep the pickles separate, obviously. For some spiciness, I added some sriracha to the pork and broccoli at the last minute.