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Spice Up Your Hump Day
Turkey vegetable chili: One bowl fits all.
Even vegetarians!
Feeding my household is challenging at best. I am the only mammal eater, so there’s no upside to making beef or pork. In fact it’s come to the point where I have to take my steak or burger into another room to spare my loved ones the traumatizing smell of charred, formerly sentient flesh. Salt and cheese are off the menu owing to Mr. Slattern’s health concerns, the apple of my eye dislikes potatoes, I’m trying to avoid pasta and bread, and serving beans more than once a week would be, gastrically speaking, unfortunate on an Old Testament scale. Let’s just leave it at that.
So it’s fish or chicken or turkey or fish most nights, except on omelette night, or in the event of a sit down strike, which in my house is shorthand for I’m sick of cooking, out of ideas and borrowing patience, so unless you’re prepared to have cereal (and in my case, vodka) for dinner — yes, again — we’d best go out.
Saturday night is bean night!
wicked good beans!
In Maine, back in the Bronze Age when I grew up, it was traditional to have Boston baked beans on Saturday night, and by this I mean every Saturday night. Now, there were families that just heated up a can of B&M, dumped some coleslaw from Shaw’s into a bowl, steamed up the brown bread and called it a night. Not mine. For us, baked beans represent serious tradition. Grammie Sue baked her own, as do my parents, and so do I. In the past, I have even made my own brown bread, but I cannot in good conscience urge you to do so; just buy the can. Making brown bread is a pain in the bean shoot.
Why Saturday night?, I’ll bet you’re wondering. Well, I can only guess, but my hunch is that it has something to do with the Puritan mania for mortification of the flesh. Let me explain.
Kitchen Slattern 