Green Tomato, Pork, and White Bean Chili in a Slow Cooker

Hello, my name is Kirsten and I have a problem.

(Hello, Kirsten.)

I like to make chili using not-the-usual vegetable suspects.  It all started with this Green Tomato Garlic chili recipe a year ago.  I liked it so much I put up a couple of quarts of chopped green tomatoes in the freezer for winter chili.  Instead of making more green tomato chili, however, I veered off in a squash and beet direction with Acorn Squash, Beet, and Sweet Potato chili.  Then I used a quart of the green tomatoes for Green Tomato Bacon Jam.

This chili has cubes of pork, Great Northern beans, and my put up salsa verde.  I wanted a thick chili, so I added some grits and wow--that did it for me.  We liked this chili with a swirl of sour cream stirred into each bowl.  I bet my corn cheddar bacon muffins would be great with it.  If you're having a chili cook off, this would be a little something different.  It's easy to fix (the slow cooker does most of the work) and the flavor is wonderful.  This is also great for a work day meal--brown the pork the night before while the kitchen is still active with dinner, chill it overnight, and dump all the ingredients into the slow cooker the next morning.

Note to self--this fall, put up more quarts of chopped green tomatoes!  In fact, I think I'll put the word out with my neighbors that if they don't want their tomatoes still on the vine when the first frost is predicted, I'll be happy to come harvest.  The cool thing about green tomatoes is that they can hang out on your counter for a few days until you can process them.  What's the worst that can happen--they start to ripen?  Oh, the horrors.

Introducing the Visual Pizza Recipe Index

There is no recipe in today's pizza post.
If you came here looking for your weekly pizza fix--thank you, thank you, thank you.  I really appreciate that you took time out of your day to come here to my blog!
After about 52 weeks of posting a pizza recipe every Friday, I decided that my pizza category over there ----> on my drop down recipe index by category was getting sort of unwieldy. [You'd think I'd spent many years working in libraries or something with my love of indexes and categories. You'd be right.]

I decided to take my slowly-growing html skills and try and tackle a Visual Pizza Recipe Index.

I mean, who has seen my first ever pizza post?  [Thanks, Mom, Felicia, Heather, Debbie, Sue . . .]  I don't create these things so that they can be buried in the blog.  I'd like someone to say 'hey, I've got spinach and leftover turkey, can I make a pizza with it?' and be able to search for ideas here as well as Google.

I broke this index down into four categories.

I've got recipes for pizza doughs (from the rather plain 'buttermilk' dough to the exotic 'beet' dough).

I've got recipes for pizzas with fruit (interestingly, what some would say is the typical pizza fruit, pineapple, does not appear in this category--yet).

I've got recipes for pizzas that include meat toppings (and my lovely little fishies too).

I've got recipes for pizzas that include no meat (or optional meat).

Enough teasing with the screen shots, though I do appreciate my kids teaching their old mum how to take a screen shot.  Here's where to find the Visual Pizza Recipe Index!

And I'll leave you with one of my spouse's favorites from the past year of pizzas:  Turkey Spinach Pesto Pizza.  Oh, please think of this one if you have leftover turkey this fall--it was really yummy and my spouse talked about it for quite some time, wishing that I'd make that one over again.  Perhaps when he returns I'll humor him, but I doubt it since, hey, always a new pizza on the horizon!

This is shared with the From The Farm Blog Hop,  Clever Chicks Blog Hop, Wednesday Fresh Foods Link Up, What's Cookin' Wednesday, and What's In The Box.

Fried Rice with Massaged Kale

I'm probably the last one on the massaged kale bandwagon, and I'm OK with that.  Alanna taught me that you could massage olive oil into torn pieces of kale to soften it for a great raw kale salad.  What I took a chance on was the idea of using massaged kale in a quickly-cooked dish--would it work?

I'm happy to share that it does work.  Our fried rice repertoire has now expanded to include kale, and my kids are enjoying kale not only in soup and in pizza dough, but also in fried rice. Green smoothies, too.  Tomorrow, the world! This is huge in my book.  I mean, my spouse and I enjoy every item in our large CSA share, one way or another.  Our farmers are amazing, their land is very productive, and the kids seem to want to eat multiple times a day, so it really works well if I can use the CSA bounty in a way that also feeds my children.  Double win!