Bacon, Beef and Beet Chili

A hearty chili of beef, beets, and tomatoes--flavored with bacon.

Chili is good for hockey season. When I have an afternoon available I'll make a pot of chili on a back burner while processing vegetables or making another dinner. The chili goes into the fridge for later in the week, then on the appointed day hangs out in the crock pot on Warm.  All day.  I just need someone {my sled hockey player} to grate the cheese and set out the fixings, and it's time to eat.

See the bowl in these photos? I got it at Hot Soups for a Cool Cause, a fundraiser for the Dayton International Peace Museum. My folks and I attend the twice-yearly events since their visits happened to coincide. With my donation I not only got an assortment of delicious soups and excellent conversation--I got to keep the bowl! I was amazed to learn that the potter lives a few blocks away--small world. I did not have this chili at the fundraiser (though I had a tasty borscht last month at the Cool Soups for a Hot Cause event). Instead, I pulled it out of my ear--doing a bit of a riff on my Acorn Squash, Beet and Sweet Potato Chili.

Our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farmers are great at growing beets.  The family is just not that into beets, despite 8 years of exposure to this delicious vegetable. No matter. If we get beets in the farm share, we get beets in our bellies. We eat what is in the fridge. Or else!

This time, bacon was my vehicle to facilitate the beets' acceptance. A little bacon goes a long way, flavor-wise, so I am glad to incorporate some into this chili. I'm gratified that the kids like chili--it's easy to cook, reheats well, and can assimilate a bunch of vegetables.

I've updated my Visual Recipe Index--for more recipes featuring beets, check out my Beet Recipes Collection!

Easy Frosted Pumpkin Cream Cheese Muffins

Tender roasted pumpkin, flavored with pumpkin spiced cheese in both the batter and as frosting, make these muffins an easy Fall treat.

I'm bursting with Fall here. As I sit writing this, I've spent the weekend visiting a Pioneer Harvest Festival, hiking with the family to see the changing leaves, and enjoying our little city's Fall Festival--complete with the high school marching band playing for the Costume Parade. [My daughter counted 12 Elsas, 6 Annas, and 3 Olafs--characters from Frozen if you've been under a rock or deployed--in the parade. Our town is only 2 square miles! I suspect I'll be overrun with Frozen characters for trick or treating, and plan to require a song in exchange for candy. I'll sing along.]
Although I hate to fill up the blog with extraneous photos, I'd like you to join me in the Fall frame of mind. Here's a few of my spouse's finest photos from this weekend:

This lovely man taught us about the Case Thresher, then we watched it in action. Wow.

With all this Fall-ness abounding, and because it's Monday and I like to celebrate Muffin Mondays, I thought it was time to share this recipe for Easy Frosted Pumpkin Cream Cheese Muffins. At the end of the previous All Things Pumpkin season [have you seen the current Fearless Flyer from Trader Joes? Oh, my!] I picked up a container of pumpkin spice soft spreadable cheese because it had a Magical Markdown sticker on it. I make so many impulse purchases in the grocery store due to Magical Markdown stickers, like this Pork Steak, Salsa Verde and Oaxaca Cheese Pizza. The brand of cheese I used is Alouette, but use whatever you can find where you live. There's even a recipe for muffins in the package--but once I saw that their muffins contained no pumpkin, and used a box of cake mix . . . well, I decided to go in a different direction--but kept the frosting part because it's part of the fun of the cheese.

This recipe calls for pumpkin puree. My Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share and my stubbornly independent garden [I swear if it could talk, the garden would say 'don't tell me what to grow--you're not the boss of me!'] provide a more-than-ample supply of pumpkins, so I rarely buy the cans of pure pumpkin but they work great as well. Here's how I process my pumpkins into roasted puree to use throughout the year. For other recipes using pumpkin, including more muffins, please see my collection of Pumpkin Recipes.

Roasted Beet & Arugula Pizza

Roasted beets nestled between shreds of fresh mozzarella and gorgonzola on a béchamel sauce bed, then topped with spicy pepperoni or salty ham. Once baked, scatter fresh arugula across and serve.

It's been a while since I've shared a pizza recipe. I've been creating pizzas nearly every weekend, because my housemates have, ahem,  Expectations, but I'm not always taking photos and jotting down recipe notes. This recent pizza, using beets and arugula from our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share, looked interesting enough to snap a few photos.

Have you ever been to a book signing?  I sorta went to one recently. In fact, I accompanied my spouse to the signing of an author he enjoys--John Scalzi.  The signing was at an independent bookstore and I happily curled up in the cookbook section--after reading all about becoming Amish in a survivalist magazine!  I'm always up for a trip to the bookstore--I can entertain myself for hours and I always learn something new. While reading I had half an ear listening to the author's presentation, and this guy is good. He read some excerpts from  . . . [something, I dunno, it could have been his newest book or could have been his collected works--like I said I was listening with half an ear] and in between excerpts he'd give a general overview of how the signing would proceed for the ever-growing audience "tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em, tell 'em, tell 'em what you told 'em" style. His reading style was expressive, confident, and relaxed. During the Q&A he was both thoughtful and funny. Even though my spouse had a Kindle copy of the newest book, he picked up a copy to donate to our library.

While I was enjoying this presentation-by-an-author-I'd-never-read**, I was also flipping through cookbooks and gathering inspiration. One pizza cookbook (from a restaurant in NYC with a celebrity chef and a catchy title that I cannot find on Amazon) had a section on basic pizza sauces to have on hand. The list included tomato, pesto, and béchamel. 

Béchamel . . . hmm. I'd just been reading about sauces in Melt: The Art of Macaroni and Cheese (Amazon affiliate link) since I've had a terrific hankering for mac and cheese this Fall.  It is just butter, flour, and warm milk--I can make that.  Heck, I've been making it and calling it a Basic White Sauce, out of my 1950 Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook (like I did in my Creamed Swiss Chard with Back Bacon here)! I thought to myself 'Self, why have I never put a basic white sauce on a pizza before?'. After I read that béchamel sauce keeps for a few days, I figured I could play around with it and here we are.

I've updated my Visual Recipe Index--for more recipes using beets, look here. For more recipes using arugula, look here.