This past week I had some good food adventures making Ahi tuna paired with my garden vegetables plus sticky rice and then made some chili a couple of days later also using garden vegetables. The tuna dish I kept simple with the fillets and used this for my base recipe: https://www.bowlofdelicious.com/six-minute-seared-ahi-tuna-steaks/ . The tuna turned out excellent with eggplant, green beans, tomatoes, jalapenos and okra from my garden brushed with olive oil then dusted with salt, pepper, garlic, fresh basil and rosemary on both sides. The okra I will never do like that again but the other vegetables turned out delicious. I used the sauce to marinate the tuna and made another batch for dipping, it was so good!
Next I took a chuck roast and placed it in brine overnight and cooked it nice and slow on my Traeger grill. The chuck roast came out with the right tenderness and flavor but when I put it back in it’s au jus which I didn’t taste beforehand it became too salty. I made a few side dishes the past days like tacos and breakfast dishes as I always do when I smoke meats but wanted to do something wholesale to be able to use this chuck roast and diffuse the salt and decided to make some chili. I used this recipe as the base: https://www.cookingclassy.com/slow-cooker-chili/ leaving out the salt and beef broth so I could soak the salt out of the chuck roast meat. I also added some more beef cut into taco meat sized chunks not totally ground and that worked out well. I used tomatoes from my garden plus come canned diced tomatoes. I put a habanero pepper from my garden to provide some kick!
I had a couple of spoons of the chili to test out while watching the Dodgers game and it was so delicious I decided to have a couple of small bowls late after the Dodgers beat the Braves and took first place from the SF Giants who lost to the Brewers.
The chili is so good but now I have to stay up late, wait for it to cool and put in the refrigerator where I already cleared space. The overnight process that will blend all the flavors and spices together will be awesome. The saltiness is gone from the chuck roast and I like the addition of that cocoa powder to the chili, which gives good depth. I just recently found the powdered cocoa on the very top shelf in my spice cabinet way to the back wondering when I would use it. Now I can’t wait to eat this chili out of a bowl traditionally, in breakfast meals and with foot long beef hot dogs I have with sesame seed gourmet buns. I may even freeze some of this chili!
