A Dietary Winner: Authentic Texas Chili

My diet presents a daily challenge.  Due to my kidney failure, there are a host of food products that I cannot eat or have to watch my consumption of like a hawk.  Some that come readily to mind are junk food, dairy products, tomatoes, potatoes, cheese, and bacon.  Oh, and don’t forget chocolate!  This means that I can almost never eat on a whim, and that I have had to give up a slew of foods that I love.  These include pizza, french fries, meat sauce/marinara sauce, ice cream, M & M’s, and double cheeseburgers slathered in ketchup.  It’s a tough road to hoe, but I do the best that I can day after day.  Every once in a while I slip up, but the monthly report I receive from my nutritionist slaps me back into reality.

One of my big no-no foods is lasagna.  This presents a problem because I make a damn fine four-cheese sausage-and-chopped-meat two-pan lasagna, and I absolutely refuse to compromise on the ingredients.  For my money, there’s only one way to make lasagna:  the right way!  So I only make it about twice a year, doctor’s orders be damned, and I eat it like it’s my last meal.

Chili presents a different issue.  Chili is to me more of an everyday food, and I eat it a lot more often.  It’s comfort food goodness that is great over rice, hot dogs, or nachos, or all by itself.  Problem is, the way I make it contains tomatoes and beans – two foods that are explicitly forbidden from my diet.  And I have insane chili cravings every now and again.  Until recently, I dealt with this dilemma sort of like I dealt with the lasagna issue – by damning the food gods.  Bad idea.  I eat chili a lot more often than I eat lasagna, so “just doing it” is not a good solution.

I then remembered from a cooking show – most likely one of those excellent chili cooking contests – that “authentic” Texas chili does not contain beans.  Tomatoes?  I wasn’t so sure.  A quick bit of Internet research provided a most agreeable answer:  authentic Texas chili contains only beef, onions, chili peppers or chili powder, salt and a little animal fat (like lard or bacon grease).  Touchdown!  All the ingredients are part of my already-truncated food list.

Once I tried cooking authentic Texas chili, I was even happier, because it is one of the simplest recipes known to man.  Making a good burger from scratch is more difficult.  You simply render the fat, brown the beef, add the onions, add garlic (optional), and add chilies, chili powder or a combination thereof.  Simmer and stir on very low heat for two to eight hours (depending on how much time you have) while adding salt and pepper to taste, and you’re done!  You’ve brought an inexpensive, healthy, stick-to-your-ribs batch of chili into the world.  And any chili aficionado will tell you that this is only the tip of the iceberg.  Authentic Texas chili can be the starting point for a multitude of variations on the original recipe; the only limitations are common sense and, in my case, diet.  A cook can also take the opposite tack and work on refining the original recipe – a little more heat, a little less onion, a little more liquid, a different cut of beef -- until it comes out just as they like it.

I look forward to spending many hours refining my own authentic Texas chili recipe and sharing the results with friends and family – and my readers, too!