Texan Chili

Topped with spring onions and Chives and served with a grilled Joseph pitta bread

I love slow cooked beef and when I saw the photo of a Texan Chili in The Food Lab book, I instantly wanted to create it. I wasn’t totally happy with the recipe though so thought I’d make some modifications. The recipe in the book is pretty much meat, an onion, chilis and spices. That was a bit limited and I wanted to bulk it out a bit so fused it with the usual chili I make and added sliced mixed peppers, chopped tomatoes and kidney beans along with a few spice changes.

Also, rather than just using diced beef I added some Waitrose Ox cheek (from the meat counter). I saw it online and had never tried it so thought this was a good test. At just £7.99 per kg it’s a fair bit cheaper than the beef and stew recipes online spoke of how delicious and rich it is. First impression was how dark red the meat was, then how tough it was to cut compared to beef. I browned it off in a cast iron pan and the edges of the meat went a dark, caramelised brown. It looked great! In comparison, the beef didn’t look as impressive when it had browned. The ox cheek kept its lovely, charred edges all through the cooking too.

After browning the meat I added it to the slow cooker along with the sweated onions and garlic and the rest of the ingredients apart from the cornflour and kidney beans. I slow cooked it on low overnight and then early in the morning added the cornflour and kidney beans. I switched the temperature to high and left the lid off for a few hours to allow the Chili to thicken.

Then it was the taste test: Wow! The spice level was perfect for me. It had a comforting, warming heat while not being so spicy that it made my nose run uncontrollably and my lips burn! It was delicious. The meat was all tender and I couldn’t tell the difference between the ox cuts and beef cuts. They tasted the same to me. As the ox cheek is a cheaper cut it makes sense to use it when slow cooking as an alternative to beef. It’s also pretty lean.

Texan Chili Recipe

Serves: 6

Ingredients:
Chili paste:
4 dried chili, deseeded and torn
3 Jalapeno peppers or large green chilli peppers descended and cut into chunks
1 heaped tsp chipotle paste
125ml chicken stock

The Chili:
3 cloves garlic, minced/finely sliced
1 red onion, diced
About 1kg of meat (I used 800g lean, diced braising/casserole beef and 330g Ox cheek)
500g sliced mixed peppers (frozen is fine)
1/2 tsp Ground Cinnamon
1/2 tbsp Ground Cumin
1 tsp Smoked Paprika
1 tsp Coriander paste
1 tsp Dried Oregano
15 squirts Turci BBQ spray (Or 1 Tbsp smoked BBQ sauce) *optional
Fresly ground salt and pepper
500ml chicken stock
400g tin of chopped tomatoes
1 tin kidney beans
20g cornflour

Method:
1. Fry/toast the dried chilis and jalapenos on a medium heat until the dried ones start to colour. Add 125ml chicken stock and leave to simmer until the dried chilis are rehydrated. Once cooked, add to a blender with chipolte paste and blend into a chili paste.
2. Fry the onion and garlic until soft and then add to the slow cooker.
3. Brown the Ox cheek and diced beef in batches and then add to the slow cooker.
4. Add the rest of the ingredients apart from the kidney beans and cornflour.
5. Leave to cook overnight or for at least 4 hours on low in the slow cooker.
6. Drain the kidney beans and add to the slow cooker.
7. Spoon out liquid and mix with the cornflour to form a thin paste and then pour into the slow cooker.
8. Switch to high and take the lid off. Leave to cook for a few hours for the Chili to reduce and thicken.

Macros (Per serving): 341kcal (44P, 18C, 10F)

Bubbling away in the slow cooker

Szechaun Chicken noodles

I didn’t take any photos of this dish while I made it as I didn’t really expect it to be exciting, however, I ended up making my own Szechaun sauce which turned out to be be really tasty and much lower in calories than the shop-bought stuff so I wanted to note the recipe so I could remember and make it again.

For Szechaun chicken I find that most ready-bought sauces lack the “stickiness” that the authentic chinese-takeaway dish has. Blue Dragon Szechuan Tomato stir fry sauce sachets seem to be the only ones that stay sticky and tasty but to serve 4 you would need 2 sachets which comes in at just under 300 calories and loaded with sugar so it’s not really a healthy option.

Although you could use normal noodles, I used Eat Water Slim noodles which are made from Konjac flour so have 9 calories per 100g. The noodles aren’t very exciting on their own, but when you turn them into a dish like singapore noodles, Thai noodle soup, ramen or szechuan noodles then they really absorb the flavors and taste REALLY good. You don’t have to use the Eat Water ones, there are Zero noodles, Barenaked noodles, etc. so just use whatever you have.

There are a few “cheat” ingredients in my recipe. Firstly I marinated my chicken in 1/4 packet of Flava-it sweet chilli marinade overnight. I’ve not used this before, but it gave the chicken a great flavor. An alternative would be no marinade or maybe some sweet chilli sauce. I also used some Lee Kum Kee Chilli Chilli Garlic Sauce which can be found in Chinese supermarkets and some Tesco stores. You could, however, make your own version of Lee Kum Kee sauce. From the ingredient list I’d say 1Tbsp would be around 1/2 Tbsp chilli paste, a pinch of salt, 1/4 tsp garlic paste and 1/4 tsp rice wine vinegar.

As a sugar substitute I used Sukrin:1. I love this granulated sweetener. It has a really lovely sweet taste without being too overpowering like other finely powdered sweeteners can be. It’s great for cooking and baking.

To make the sauce I added an initial broth to the veggies as they cooked to infuse some flavor and then drained this off with the water from the veggies as a vegetable stock. I mixed together a second sauce using a few other ingredients, cornflour (to thicken) and the vegetable stock, heated this sauce in a separate pan to thicken, and then added it back to the dish at the end when I added the noodles.

As a final note,  you can just use a wok for this recipe, however, I find using an Actifry helps retain the stickiness of the sauce. So typically, I cook my chicken in an Actify, reserve it. Soften the veggies in the Wok until they’ve dropped some of their water weight and shrunk down so they will fit in my Actifry! Take the veggie water for the sauce and then add the veggies to the Actifry with the sauce and chicken. I finally add it all back into the Wok with the beansprouts, spring onions and noodles and heat through before serving. This is a fair bit of messing about, so the method below assumes that you’re just using a Wok.

Szechuan Chicken “Slim” Noodles Recipe

Serves: 5 (A week’s meal prepped lunches, or add a few extra veggies and make it to serve 4 for dinner)

Ingredients:
Meat and Veg
(This can be any veggies and meat that you like, but here’s what I used…)
400g diced chicken breast marinated in 1/4 pack Flava-it Sweet Chilli Marinade
200g mushrooms, quartered
200g mixed peppers, sliced
300g small Broccoli florets,
300g julienned courgette
6 Spring onions, sliced
50g Kale
200g Bean sprouts
3 packs (600g) drained Eat water Slim Noodles (or other Konjac noodles)

Initial Broth
1/2 Tbsp Lee Kum Kee Chilli Garlic Sauce
100g passata
2 garlic cloves
20g sweet chilli sauce
1Tbsp white wine vinegar
Splash of balsamic vinegar

Sauce
Drained liquid from cooked veg/broth
1/2 Tbsp Lee Kum Kee Chilli Garlic Sauce
1 Tbsp tomato puree
30g Sukrin granulated sweetener
1Tbsp rice wine vinegar
10g cornflour

1. Fry the diced chicken breast and then set aside.
2. Throw all of the veggies apart from the spring onions and bean sprouts into a wok and allow to soften.
3. Meanwhile, make the broth sauce by combining in a bowl all of the broth ingredients. Stir to mix and then add to the veggies. Place the lid on the veggies to allow them to soften for around 10 mins.
4. While the veggies are softening add 10g cornflour to a bowl and use a large spoon to take some of the liquid from the veggie pan to add to the cornflour. Gradually add the water until the cornflour is smoothly mixed. Next, add all of the other ingredients to the sauce and stir to combine.
5. Once the veggies are softened you should have a fair amount of liquid in the pan. Remove as much liquid as possibe and add it to the sauce.
6. Place the sauce in a small pan with the lid on and bring to the boil stirring occasionally. You should find that it thickens into a nice, sticky sauce.
7. Add the chicken, bean sprouts, noodles, spring onions and sauce and mix to combine (Note: At this point adding mange tout, green beans, baby corns, julienned carrots or some other crunchy veggies might be nice for texture). When in the pan, I use scissors to chop up the noodles into smaller, more manageable sizes so that they mix better with the other ingredients.
8. Allow to cook for around 5-10 mins until the ingredients have absorbed the lovely sauce flavor.

Macros per serving: 193kcal (24P, 19C, 1F)