Q: Do you have any good chicken chili recipes for a crockpot?
- Michael C.
A: I was trying to guess why you would want a chili recipe specifically for a crockpot or slow cooker, and I came up with the following:
1. You don't want to be bothered during the weekend football games, so you want to start the chili before the games begin, forget about it during the first and second games and eat before the late game.
2. You're a guy - possibly single - so maybe your house doesn't smell the way it should. Using a slow cooker will turn your Saturday night beer aroma into a home-sweet-home perfume.
3. Using a crockpot means you aren't going to have a sink full of prep dishes to clean up. However, if
you're single, you probably don't have a bunch of pots anyway.
4. There isn't much chance of screwing up a slow-cooker recipe.
5. Then again, if it doesn't turn out, you can always blame it on the slow cooker (which is fine with me, since I'm normally the one who gets blamed).
Any of the above theories may or may not be true - kind of like the many stories about the origins of chili. There are always heated arguments about where the first bowl of chili was made and by whom, not to mention the raging debate over whose chili recipe is the best.
Most food historians will agree that the following information is true.
FACT: To keep things straight or to prevent us from losing our minds: The word chile refers to the actual pepper, while chili refers to the dish.
FACT: Jesse James (1847-1882), the famous outlaw, refused to rob a bank in a town just north of Fort Worth, Texas, because that was where his favorite chili parlor was located. He was quoted as saying, "Anyplace that has a chili joint like this just ought to be treated better."
FACT: True cowboys were thought of as the first "chili heads" because when they traveled, they would carry "chili bricks" with them. These homemade kits contained everything needed to make chili except for the liquid, including diced dried beef, a fat of some sort, chile peppers, wild onions, garlic and other ingredients.
When it came time to make the chili, they would add water to these "bricks" in the slow cooker of the day, a cast-iron Dutch oven.
FACT: One of the things that contributed to chili's growing popularity was Spanish priests' belief that chile peppers were aphrodisiacs. They sermonized against this "soup of the devil."
