I'm catering for a friend's Brownie Pack Holiday in Feburary (typically starting on 23rd February just so I can't use it for cooking a meal for 8). Hopefully we'll be having an international theme, which means Swiss, British, Indian and Mexican food.
My chilli'll need a fair bit of development, as I'll need to know what and how much to order.
My batch a few weeks ago was:
1 pack quorn mince
1 carton sieved tomatoes
Garlic puree
1 onion
1 pepper
Oregano
Cumin
Chilli powder
Maple syrup
Salt
Pepper
Results from that:
-Quorn mince isn't that nice, and soya mince is better and much cheaper (don't ask me why, but I've got it into my head to cater the entire weekend vegetarian)
-I use too much chilli powder
I also need to decide what to serve with it - I don't feel like cooking huge amounts of rice, so I might go for potato wedges.
Aim for next chilli - write down herb, spice and maple syrup quantities.
Gah, it appears I can't cut and paste into this pagebuilding program, only within it, which is annoying as I'd typed this all up in notepad first.
My eventual chilli recipe
6 servings
1 Sweet potato
1 Pepper
1 Onion
140g Tomato puree
500g Passata
400g Tin chopped tomatoes
200g Soya mince
3in Garlic puree
2tsp Sugar
4tsp Oregano
4tsp Cumin
4tsp Coriander
1/2tsp Chilli powder
2tbsp Oil
Salt
Pepper
1. Prick the sweet potato with a fork and microwave for about 8 minutes until softish.
2. Chop the onion and pepper; fry in the oil with the garlic
3. Add herbs and spices.
4. Add passata, tomatoes and sugar.
5. Pour boiling water over the mince and leave for a few minutes.
6. Add the mince.
7. Peel the skin off the sweet potatoes and chop into chunks.
8. Season and cook for a further 15 minutes.
Of course, I forgot to add the kidney beans, but I'll chunk a tin of them in on pack holiday too. If you're cooking in an ovenproof saucepan, after seasoning you can whack it in the oven at about gas mark 5 for hours until you need it. It really concentrates the flavours making it extra scrummy; this trick also works really well with a nice meaty bolognaise sauce too.
I cooked this with home made wedges (same spice mix as for the chilli - cut, microwave, mix in spices, stick in hot oven), but for pack holiday I'm going to use shop bought wedges because it's easier.
For pudding, I've invented something that might be vaguely mexicanish. All the recipes online either look very heavy or are chocolatey (we've having chocolate rice pud the night before), so I'm going to do a tropical fruit salad (pineapple, banana, passion fruit) and serve it with dulce de leche (boiled condensed milk basically, popular across the Americas and called cajeta in Mexico) and cinnamon tortilla crisps. (Chop tortillas into wedges, sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon, bake at gas mark 5 for 10 minutes, leave to cool.) I need to go easy on the cinnamon on pack holiday as some of my last batch were a bit cinnamon heavy and it tasted a bit bitter.