Today I took my kitchen road trip out to the wild, wild west and made some venison chili from page 387…except I didn’t use venison, so this is my Not Venison Chili!
Now you might be wondering how you make a dish called venison chili without the venison. It’s simple, you substitute another protein for the venison, in this case, I used pork. Now I happen to love venison, it has a very unique and complex flavor, and it also has the advantage of being both low in fat and wonderfully tender – an exceedingly rare combination. The problem is that it’s not easily accessible, and that makes it prohibitively expensive for me to purchase since I need to shop on a tight budget. I want Martha’s American Food to be embraced by everyone who loves cooking and eating good food, whatever your budget happens to be. That’s why I thought this would be a good recipe to modify to my budget, while preparing it very closely to her recipe in order to get all those awesome flavors and textures – and it was a smashing success! Other than using the pork, I made a few minor modifications to the recipe. I left out the red pepper flakes and added an Anaheim pepper and a shot of sriracha. I added a tablespoon of brown sugar because when I’m making something spicy and acidic, I like to balance it with a little bit of sweetness. Instead of cooking the crispy bacon with the rest of the chili, I used it as a topping along with sliced avocado.
Living on a budget doesn’t mean you need to eat only processed and fast food. Fresh vegetables aren’t hard on the wallet, and if you can budget in some less expensive proteins like chicken, pork and certain cuts of beef like top round, you can eat healthy and eat well at almost any income level. I’m hoping that when we’re a little more financially secure I can try this recipe again using venison because I’m sure that would be beyond amazing, but this was a great dinner and we hardly felt deprived eating it down to the last drop!
I must add that my husband Jeff, the chili connoisseur, is torn between this and Martha’s Texas Chili as his favorite chili of all time. We’ve been doing chili one way for many years…and don’t get me wrong, that way is tasty too…but it’s exciting for us to use this book to come up with new ways to prepare our favorite dishes with a little Marthaesque flair!
