Pork Green Chili

This is my first cooking blog. As I was preparing this dish, the process just had to be written down and shared with the world. I have a passion for cooking and feeding my family and friends, and it’s about damn time I started blogging about it.

On tonight’s menu: Pork Green Chili!

My family has been cooking chili for as long as I can remember. At the annual Alaska State Fair Chili Cook-off, there are usually about fifteen contestants, and like eight of them are related to me. Generally, my family cooks red chili, but in the last few years we have begun to venture down the green valley.

Competition chili is a very big deal. No beans. Period. You use high quality meats sliced into very tiny cubes, very tiny. It has a strong swift kick, the judges like that, but not too strong that you burn off valuable taste buds. You use secret ingredients, and never, ever share your recipe.

Well, tonight is no competition, and I’m going to share the green chili process because I enjoyed it so much. From hand picking fresh peppers at the grocery store, to roasting them in the oven, then slow cooking the chili all evening in the crock pot.

I started at Carrs Safeway and purchased an assortment of peppers including jalapenos, serranos, yellow chilis, green peppers, and poblanos. First, I washed them and sliced off the stems and removed the pulpy center and seeds. (note: the seeds are hard to separate from the flesh after roasted) I split open the peppers and laid them on a cookie sheet covered in foil. I took a paper towel and dabbed olive oil on the pepper skins. I guess you’re supposed to broil them, but I just put them in the oven at 450F for about 15 minutes. Once the skins were nice and charred, they were easy to separate from the pepper. I diced the slimy pepper into small pieces and mixed them all in a zip lock bag. Ideally, you should roast the peppers right before you make the chili. I didn’t have the time, so I did it in advance. I took the bag of mixed roasted peppers and added some brown sugar, salt, and garlic juice. (yes, the liquid from the minced garlic container) I have never done this before, but I thought it would bring out the flavors in the peppers.

The next day, I realized I didn’t thaw the pork chops. Cool. So, I had to wait another whole day for chili, and they still weren’t completely thaw, but I used them anyways. For anyone else attempting to recreate this recipe, I would not recommend using pork chops haha. I do not know what I was thinking. I should have got a different cut of pork like a loin or something easier to cut. It was a real bitch cutting the meat off of like eight pork chops, into very, very tiny pieces.

After the meat was cubed, I lightly coated it in flour and cooked it in butter. I was only planning on crocking the chili for 4-6 hours, so I wanted to make sure the pork was fully cooked. In the crock pot, I opened two cans of chicken broth (which now I wish I would have only used one because it is having trouble thickening), two large cans of green enchilada sauce, and two medium cans of diced green chilis and jalapenos. Then I through in my roasted pepper marinade, along with the cooked pork, and covered for 4-6 hours.

For spices, I bought two pre-portioned mccormick packages, one for fajitas and one for quesadilla casserole. They had little containers with one table spoon of six different spices. I added some minced garlic, onion, cilantro, red chili pepper, black pepper and cumin. I also added some extra cayenne, which gave her a nice kick!

This brings my first cooking blog to an end. I really enjoyed this whole process, and writing about it makes it even more fun. I hope that you enjoy it too. If you like the photos in my “delicious food” album on Facebook, then hopefully this blog will become a big hit too!