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How To Break In as a Mystery Shopper by Richard O. Mann Ever want to work as mystery shopper? Let a veteran of over 500 secret shops explain how you find shopping companies, sign up, and get assignments. Get paid to eat out, stay in hotels, and shop in almost every kind of store. It's fun! This no-nonsense, level-headed guide spells out the process for you. (This immediately downloadable e-book written by your friendly Bean Bible editor, Rich Mann, is part of the dynamite Dream Jobs To Go series.)
A Recipe by Richard Mann This is my personal chili recipe that I've been making for over 30 years. We served it at a church Christmas party last night. (We made a 16-recipe batch!) We got many, many raves and dozens of requests for the recipe, so I'm posting here for all to see. Check it out.
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This recipe is based on one that appeared (in slightly different form) in Consumer Reports years ago. They said they tested dozens of popular recipes, choosing this one as the best. I agree that it makes an all-around good generic chili. What follows is a double batch recipe since we always make it in double batches. (I only called this the "Best You Can Make" to get your attention. Chili engenders fierce loyalties and wildly differing opinions. This is a great chili for middle-of-the-road folks.)
The All-Around Best Chili You Can Make
4 pounds hamburger
4 medium onions, diced
2 cups chopped green peppers
2 4-ounce cans chopped green chilies
2 28-ounce cans whole tomatoes, with the juice (See the discussion of tomatoes below for other options.)
1 pound bag of pinto beans (or other beans), picked over and soaked in water overnight (See the note below if you want to use canned beans.)
4 cups water
1 16-ounce can red kidney beans, undrained
4 healthy-sized cloves of garlic, minced (I use a garlic press, a wonderful invention.)
4 Tablespoons chili powder (more if you want it spicier)
2 teaspoons ground cumin
2 teaspoons salt
Pick over the beans and soak them in plenty of water overnight.
Cook the hamburger, onions, and green peppers together. Drain the fat. Put the (soaked) beans, water, tomatoes, hamburger mix, garlic, chili powder, and cumin (all of it at once) into a big pot (it takes a BIG one) and boil it until the beans are soft. This will take several hours. Be patient. If using dry beans, wait to add the salt until the beans are soft--they say salt toughens beans as they cook.
Add water as it cooks to keep it to the proper liquid consistency.
NOTES:
Beans: We've had a little trouble with the beans being slightly tough, no matter how long we cook them, which we are working on. (It's probably due to the high altitude and hard water here in Utah....) The original recipe calls for canned beans, which certainly work nicely, but is more expensive than using dry beans. Use 6 or 7 cans (15 ounces each) of beans. At least half should be pinto beans, and you need one or two cans of kidney beans (one is already in the regular recipe above). Chili beans, red beans, and other favorite bean types are also OK.
If you use canned beans, don't drain them. If you believe, as many cookbook authors do, that draining and rinsing the beans makes a difference, go ahead, but you'll need more liquid when you make the chili than is provided in this recipe.
Tomatoes: How you work the tomatoes should depend on your preferences for chili. I like them in little chunks, so the directions above work nicely. Others don't want to find anything that's identifiably a tomato in the chili. In that case, buy stewed or diced tomatoes and pulse them in a blender to make the pieces unnoticeably small. This is probably preferable if you're making the chili for a crowd. (Last night at the church dinner, I watched one grandfatherly old gentleman, when getting his second bowl, carefully pick out the big chunk of tomato and return it to the pot. We had some pots with unblended tomatoes and some with chunky tomatoes. We aim to please. We even made a pot with no onions, which went over well with the onion-intolerant crowd.)
Home-Grown Tomatoes: There is nothing better than this chili made with fresh tomatoes right from the garden. One family of neighbors brings us tomatoes regularly and we reward them with a quart of the resulting chili, which they love.
If you can your home-grown tomatoes in quart jars, this is also a great use for those tomatoes. Use a quart as the equivalent of a 28-ounce can of tomatoes.
You say you don't always have time to log on to the Net and search the Web every time you want a new recipe? You don't have time to meander through a bookshelf of printed cookbooks to find just the right recipe? If so, you've got to sample the Library of Electronic Cookbooks available from E-Cookbooks.net. Once you join the E-Cookbooks Library, you have instant offline access to thousands of wonderful recipes. You can quickly--instantly!--search for just the right item, print it out, and get started cooking right now. Oops, you spilled something on the recipe. So what? You can print another copy any time.
Click over to the Library and download some of the free samples to see how much you'll like this handy resource. Then, for $12.95, you can buy instant download access to the E-Cookbook Library for life. Try it; I think you'll find it to be a good value. (But you should always come back here to your beloved Bean Bible when you want bean recipes. Right?)
This excellent book, 366 Delicious Ways to Cook Rice, Beans, and Grains, gives you 366 recipes for healthful, delicious bean, rice, and grain dishes from all over the world. Yes, they're primarily vegetarian recipes, but the book does include variations on the recipes that use salmon, shrimp, and chicken. Mouthwatering ethnic recipes are mixed with other "natural gourmet" items that are fascinating to read, fun to prepare, and a delight to eat. How do Smoky Black Bean Burritos sound? Or how about Pesto Pasta with Cranberry Beans? I'm ready to start cooking right now.
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The Bean Book Roy F. Guste, Jr., former proprietor of Antoine's Restaurant in New Orleans and noted cookbook author, has put together this wonderful collection of recipes for bean dishes from around the world. Everything you can imagine is in here; the variety of recipes is amazing. It includes "light" versions and a full nutritional analysis of each recipe. How does Bourbon and Black Bean Pie sound? Highly recommended by Bean Bible!
Fix-It and Forget-It Cookbook: Feasting with your Slow Cooker We usually feature bean cookbooks here, but this superb slow cooker (crock pot) cookbook has at least a hundred great bean recipes in it! My wife brought it home and I'm sold on it. The "Bean Main Dishes" section alone has 53 recipes. Recipes are short, simple, tasty, and don't use weird ingredients that you don't already have. And, while I'm excited about the bean recipes (the Sausage Bean Quickie will be the first one we try), the rest of the recipes also look wonderful. The cover says it's a "National #1 bestselling cookbook!" I believe it. Highly recommended by Bean Bible!
Easy Beans: Fast and Delicious Bean, Pea, and Lentil Recipes, Second Editon Now in a new and improved second edition, this easy-to-use and highly popular cookbook makes cooking with beans as easy as it can possibly be. No soaking beans, no complex recipes with wild, improbable ingredients. The book lives up to its promise of easy, tasty, fun recipes. Highly recommended by Bean Bible!
