When I have a large project, I tend to make a lot of something and keep it in the fridge so that I don't need to worry as much about cooking. With my first two novels, the last acts were written on a diet of jalapeno cheeseburgers. I'd buy a package of ground beef, divide it into patties, and whenever I got hungry, I'd get up from the computer, slap a patty on the cast-iron, get a plate and a bun and a Barq's red creme, flip the patty and put a slice of cheese and some Old El Paso pickled jalapenos on it, wait for the cheese to melt, pop the patty on the bun, eat the burger, drink the soda, and go back to the book.

I am not finishing a novel right now. But it's a good time of year for spice, and I have a large project.

Smoky beef chili

Cover fresh shell beans (or dry, they'll just cook longer) with salted water and add a couple cloves of garlic and a couple dried mushrooms. Place in stovetop smoker and smoke until fully cooked. Let cool in liquid. Remove mushrooms. (The mushrooms add earthiness to the beans.)

Put six or seven cherry peppers in the smoker and smoke until roasted. Let cool. Remove stems.

Meat:
2-3 pounds chuck roast, cut into 1/2 to 1 inch cubes.
1 pound hot sausage

Dry ingredients:
Wick Fowler's 2-alarm chili mix (just the chili seasoning, not the rest) or similar chili seasonings
A little salt

Wet ingredients:
1 can Ro-Tel tomatoes with green chiles
Smoke-roasted cherry peppers
Smoked bean cooking liquid
15-20 cloves of garlic
Two kimchi garlic scapes

Vegetables:
Green tomato kimchi
Corn kimchi
1-2 cups butternut squash, diced

Blend wet ingredients together very well.

Brown meat in large pan, in batches. Really do it in batches - just enough to cover the bottom of the pan each time - so that the meat browns, instead of steaming in its liquid.

Combine browned meat, dry ingredients, wet ingredients, a handful of corn kimchi and a few diced kimchi green tomatoes, cover with water, cover pan with foil, and bake at 350 for a couple hours.

Remove foil, add butternut squash, and bake for another hour or so, until chili liquid has reduced and squash is fully cooked.

Serve doused with cheese, cilantro, and sour cream.

chili

Friday night, an episode of The Best Thing I Ever Ate featured two different bowls of chili, and it struck me that a big meaty bowl of chili was the perfect "welcome back to meat" meal - but that I'd already done my grocery shopping and hadn't bought ground beef, skirt steak, or a chuck roast, the cuts I'd usually use for that.

So I surveyed what I had on hand and in the freezer. Beef back ribs. Marrow bones - the short kind you can scoop the marrow out of without special tools. And half a pound of ground pork left from making ma po tofu. I had ground chicken but suspected it wouldn't do well with slow cooking.

The back ribs went immediately into the slow-cooker overnight. In the morning I transferred them and enough hot stock to cover them into a bowl, and crumbled the ground pork straight into the rest of the hot stock in the cooker, along with the marrow bones, Penzey's Chili 3000 seasoning, Mexican oregano, gochujang (Korean red pepper paste), ground ancho chile, and diced onions and ramps, and let that cook all day. (Why cover the ribs in hot stock? Because they should cool in the stock for the best taste and texture. The slow cooker retains heat so long that it would have taken much of the day to cool them in the cooker, and I wanted to get the next batch of meat cooking.)

At the end of the day I strained the liquid (as well as the stock the ribs had rested in) into a separate pot and added dried pinto beans - brought them to a boil for five minutes - and turned it down to simmer until they were cooked. By this point I had roughly shredded the beef ribs, and added them to the pork/onions/ramps/marrow, and removed the marrow bones.

There was, as you might imagine, a significant slick of orange grease atop the cooking liquid. This is how you know you're on the right track.

After the beans were cooked, I removed them and added them to the meat, and added to the cooking liquid a 14 oz can of tomatoes and a jar of pimentos - both pureed - and a bunch of roughly chopped onion, and cooked that down until it started to get thick.

Why do I keep taking the meat out when I cook the liquid down? To keep from boiling the meat, which toughens it. Yes, it means the whole process takes longer and dirties more pots. I work at home and I have a dishwasher.

Once the sauce was thick, I put the meat and beans back in, freshened the flavor up with a pinch more chili powder and Mexican oregano, and let cool before putting in the fridge overnight.

I know, it probably looks like there's nothing in there but meat - it's definitely rich - but there's actually quite a lot of onion.

who is killing the great turkeys of europe

The turkey white chili I made isn't really white chili -- because it isn't white.  Typically, white chili is this weird interzone between chili and cream of chicken soup -- chicken, beans, and chiles in a sour-cream-thickened creamy sauce.  It usually lacks the conventional chile con carne seasonings like cumin, but might have some oregano, maybe a pinch of cinnamon.

But I included those, so it's really an orange chili, I guess.  Simplest thing in the world: I tossed some chopped turkey thigh with a little flour and a little red chile pepper and then quickly browned it in turkey fat; added onion, garlic, salt, and smoked turkey stock; simmered for a while until tender, and then removed it from the heat and stirred in sour cream mixed with The Spice House's chile con carne seasoning.  Good, rich, hearty turkey chili.

I didn't cook it with the beans because I'm using black beans, and I didn't like the mental image I was getting from black beans cooked with sour cream.