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.

just like that film with michael caine

It's autumn. I mean full-on no shit could snow any fucking second now autumn.  Yesterday I picked up Northern Spy apples, big and heavy and crunchy.  Parsnips.  Turnips.  Rutabagas.  And celery root.

Celery root is a bitch.

It's dirty -- filthy, really -- from all the nooks and crannies of the outside.  It's woody, and peeling alone won't take care of that.  Maybe there are differences in freshness, I don't know, but every time, I under-peel, and I end up with a couple bits of celery root that are just too woody to eat.

But it tastes great.  The celeriac (celery root) salt that I make from Fergus Henderson's recipe in Nose to Tail is amazing -- you basically just shred the celery root, mix it with salt, bake it until dry, and break it back up, but the taste is so deep and ... in a weird celery way ... very complex.  

My favorite thing to do with any celery salt is to put it on a boiled egg with hot sauce.  So for dinner last night, I took those tastes and threw them around each other: I peeled, chopped, and simmered celery root until soft, put it in a cast-iron pan with a little bacon fat, a little pork stock, and some Texas Pete hot sauce and roasted it until the celery root had soaked up the stock and turned crispy (this is a good technique for all your root vegetables), made some of those unctuous eggs, and garnished with Marx Foods Himalayan pink salt and Hawaiian black sea salt.  The crunch of both those salts is perfect for eggs in particular, but the Himalayan pink salt, a mined rock salt, was the winner here -- it has a little minerality to it that I really dig.  That and the green chile salt are my favorites so far, of these free salts.