What’s up fuckers? In case you’re wondering “hey, that’s a more aggressive start than usual”, well done, you can tell a hog’s ass from a hole in the ground. This is Kitchen Catastrophes, and I’m your King Catastrophe and Hog’s Ass, Drunk Jon. Sober Jon made some bad choices, got in deep with some digestifs and amaros (god, he even gets plastered like a puss), and now I’M in charge. For at least like, 30 minutes until I pass out. It’s like, 2 AM. So today we’re talking about exactly what it says on the tin: I made Chili, it uses curry, and it’s vegan. Probably. It’s definitely vegetarian, but I am clearly in no state to be doing rigorous animal-by-product inspections. Especially since two weeks ago I forgot HONEY was an animal by-product. This intro is getting too long. Look, if you’re gonna be a PUNK and just want the recipe, click here. Everyone else, get in the car, we’re going shopping, but someone else has to drive, I am way too tanked.

Meat Joe Young

I don’t really have a good thesis for today’s post. Oh, sure, I’m sure Sober Jon (ah, who are we kidding, Hungover Jon) will be able to cobble SOMETHING that looks legitimate and sounds sensible when he walks into the wreckage I’ve left him, but right now, I don’t know why I cooked this. Well, that’s a lie. I know WHY I cooked it: because I know that at least one vegan reads the site occasionally, and we haven’t had anything for them in MONTHS. They’ll waste away!

How will poor Vegetarians survive with just their 4” wide Cheez-It Calzones, a real thing I have eaten?

And even THAT’S not fully true, since I didn’t even realize this recipe WAS vegan until I made it. (I knew It was vegetarian, and was just tell them how to take it from vegetarian to vegan…and then realized “oh, I don’t have to do anything”. It was a pretty great feeling. Again, assuming I’m right and it IS vegan. I’d check, but the magazine is like, 4 feet away on the floor.)

I also wanted to see if it sucked: too often people deride vegan recipes as uninspired/finicky/flavorless, and I wanted to try and find something to combat that, and, I mean, if you had to pick two things that can be vegan and certainly aren’t boring,  curry sauces and coconuts would definitely be up there.

Consider the coconut.

 If I’m being totally honest, and why would I not, I’m pretty drunk, and in vino veritas, as they say. (That means “Drunk people are too stupid to lie” in Latin.) Part of it was a way to push myself toward healthier choices due to my ongoing anxiety vis a vis health and death since my father’s passing, and the infinite continuum of time and our short allotment of it…I think I need to pull out of this before I trigger something. THE POINT is that I love spicy food, I love Curries, and convincing myself to eat Vegetarian more often is probably good for my heart.

Ooh, that reminds me: I teased a couple weeks ago that I was once almost persuaded to become a vegetarian by a podcast I listened to for a class I shouldn’t have passed, but swore off that the story was too long for the moment. But now I’m drunk and rambly, which is certainly a word NOW if it wasn’t before, so let’s hit that thing up.

An Unexpected Journey

So, back in like, 2010-2011, I was about to graduate college, and I was taking Philosophy 101. Hilariously, (at least, to me), I was also taking Philosophy 321, because, as it turned out, I was in a lot of Philosophy classes. I almost minored in it BY ACCIDENT. I had just never gotten around to taking 101, and thought, “Hey, it’ll fill a requirement, and I should do it at some point.” I then proceeded to do what I did to a lot of classes in my college career: ignore it any time it was inconvenient. I had a bad habit of being totally dedicated to STAGE, the student theatre group at WSU, and  the theatre department as a whole.

It motivated me to shave my beard and protest in very blatantly labeled shirts when the department was cut.
A sin we may never be able to forgive it.

This wouldn’t normally be a BAD habit, but it led to me skewing my priorities heavily. Would me attending this class prevent me from showing up 5 minutes early to an audition? Fuck that class! Would it cut into my ability to advertise our upcoming shows? Burn it.

As such, it was of only moderate surprise to me that, by about 2/3rds through the semester, that I had completely missed two projects worth 40% of my overall grade, and was therefore HIGHLY unlikely to pass, unless I literally scored 100% on every other project, test, and assignment…a challenge I had already failed by, again, not showing up to class.

I was extended some mercy by the professor, however, who had had me in other, higher-level classes previously, and thus knew that it wasn’t a lack of knowledge that was hurting my grade. He assigned me some extra credit projects; listen to some podcasts from Philosophy Bites, a website that produced 10 minute philosophical discussions, write some reactions to them, and each one would boost my overall grade.

I actually ended up with a B in that class, and graduated just fine.
Didn’t look like this, though. I was busy bussing tables that day at my cousin’s wedding.

So it was that I ended up listening to THIS bite in particular: a discussion of vegetarianism through the lens of utiliatarianism, (ED: Your only obvious typo, Drunk Jon. You got 800 words, and got greedy.) with Jeff McMahan. If you don’t know what any of that means, a quick summary: utilitarianism in philosophy is the basic idea that an action is good if it increases general overall utility, and bad if it decreases the same, with “utility” being defined differently by different people, but generally being considered as “the property in an object whereby it produces benefit, advantage, pleasure, good or happening, [or] prevents the reverse” of the aforementioned. For an extreme quasi-musical example, it doesn’t matter, in utilitarianism, if you shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, so long as you shooting him made the world a better place. As long as that measurement is true (maybe he was an abusive spouse and general hateful bag of shit), then your action was “good”.

You may recognize this as the “Dexter solution”: it’s okay to be a serial killer, so long as you only kill other serial killers!

 Where the philosophy gets fiddly is just how, exactly, you compare differing measures of “good/pleasure/happiness”. If the guy volunteered at a soup kitchen, and was a beloved pinch hitter in his local softball league, does the happiness he generated from those counteract the pain he caused his spouse by abusing them? Most would say “no”, but there have been great arguments by various people, no time for them here.

So the basic premise of the above podcast is this: we know animals feel something like happiness. It may not be exactly like human happiness, but it’s recognizable. You know when your pets are “having fun”, and when they’re not. Thus, their relative happiness can be roughly measured, and can be compared. Which leads to the question: is eating meat a utilitarian good? Is the amount of joy you derive from eating a meal that has meat over one that doesn’t (Because it’s not like you were going to go hungry just because there wasn’t meat. You can eat a quesadilla, or rice and beans) greater than the amount of happiness that the animal killed would have experienced in the rest of its life?

You might say “yes”, and that’s fine. How you measure human happiness versus animal is a very subjective point. But to the younger Jon, it was a striking point, and one that shook him to his core. He had to wrestle for several days with whether or not he believed that, and therefore if he was doing good to participate. (His conclusion, by the way, was that the industrialized nature of modern meat production in most ways abdicates him of direct responsibility for the animal’s death, and therefore, so long as he is not the direct and primary reason an animal was killed, he can eat it with the consolation that at least he is giving its death a context and purpose. This does make him feel even WORSE about throwing out meat without eating it, as a trade-off.)

Tiger pig is proud of you, Jon.
Or at least, I’m making this photo of him express approval.
We’re entering weird territory.

And that’s enough complicated mumbo-jumbo that I’ve gone and tuckered myself out. SOBER JON, HANDLE THIS!

A Brand New Day

I gotta say, Drunk Jon, this may be your best work yet. Only one obvious screw-up, and I only edited TWO sentences in that rambling mess for clarity/adding a joke. Hell, I’m not even Hungover! You really pulled it off, bud, unlike that omnishambles you pulled just before Thanksgiving, where we had to be told that MAYBE we weren’t banned from our go-to bar after you thought the proper 9th drink of the night would be an AMF.

This blue bastard has spelled my downfall a couple times.

Normally right now is when I’d go into an extended history on the dish in question, but A: Drunk me just ate 1,200 words talking about utilitarianism and pig’s butts, and B: this recipe came straight out of a magazine, and isn’t really attached to anything. Like, it’s called a “chili” because it’s a thick bean-based stew seasoned with cumin, (And yes, Texas, I WILL defend beans as an acceptable core ingredient of chili.)  but you could easily call this a bean curry. What makes it interesting is not its history, but its composition: this is a meatless chili with 4 grams of fat per serving, 16 grams of Fiber, and 17 grams of protein. It’s an attempt to make Chili in an interesting and healthy way, by Clean Eating, a magazine/website promoting what they call, well, “Clean eating”, a diet focused on avoiding processed foods (like, using Whole-grain bread/pasta instead of white, avoiding processed sugars, etc) . Does it succeed? Let’s find out.

Stirring the Pot

One thing that really drew me to this recipe is the timing of it: my father’s award-winning recipe for chili takes somewhere between 2-3 hours to cook. This recipe takes, supposedly, only around 30. That’s very fast for ANY stew, so I was interested to see how it played out.

The first step is to cheat. Or rather, I inferred it was to cheat, since they didn’t tell me how NOT to. By which I mean you start the recipe with some Red Curry Paste, an ingredient you CAN make on your own, but is also sold commercially. And since the magazine doesn’t tell me HOW to make Red Curry Paste, I assumed they wanted me to do what was easiest.

The implicit path should always be the one of least resistance.

 You bloom the paste with some broth and cumin in the bottom of a pot. Blooming is just “cooking spices in hot water or oil to bring out their flavors”. So you’re just stirring some cumin and curry paste with broth until it looks smooth, like, 2-3 minutes.

And here’s where I run into a bit of an advising problem: I had two main complaints with this recipe, and I THINK doing one will fix the majority of the issues, but MAYBE we should start now. See, my chili almost ended up being underseasoned, and needed a lot longer than anticipated to reduce to the proper thickness. Both of these can be addressed by reducing the amount of liquid you put in the dish, but I also think bumping up the flavors now makes things easier. So I’m going to say you want to start with a tablespoon of curry paste, and 2 tsps of ground cumin.

To that, you’ll need vegetables. Green pepper is common in both curries and chilis, so it’s an obvious inclusion, and this recipe also includes cubed sweet potato for starch. Another high point of this recipe: you only cut up three things: the green pepper, the sweet potato, and some green onions. That’s some pretty easy mise-en-place.

Once you’ve got your potatoes and peppers cut up, and your spice paste looking smooth, you’re going to make the meat-substitute of this recipe, which is something I’ve never actually worked with before: Bulgur.

Seen here at disturbing proximity.

Bulgur is partially cooked cracked wheat grains. It’s used in the Middle east to make pottages and porridges, as well as a binder for meatball-like foods called “kibbeh”, and is the traditional filling for tabbouleh salad (though some regions prefer couscous).  And what’s weird about this recipe is that we cook the bulgur in vegetable stock in an 1 to 8 ratio: half a cup of bulgur to 4 cups stock. But when I read the packaging on my bulgur, it notes that a 1 to 2 ratio should be MORE than enough. And sure, we’re also cooking the potatoes and peppers, but I think this is the crux of why things went bad: I think the printed recipe is using way too much stock. So in my version of the recipe, I’m going to reduce the amount called for by a cup, and I honestly think I’m STILL using too much.

Anyway, you toss the bulgur, potato, and pepper into the pot, with the broth, bring it to a boil, slap a lid on and simmer for 10 minutes to get the bulgur cooked up and the potato softened. In the meantime, prep phase two of the process: the dump-ins. Once the bulgur is cooked, we’re really just going to pour in a lot of stuff, simmer it all together, until it looks right, and serve. And the ingredients going in are pretty interesting.

Ah, yes, cans. Very interesting indeed.

That’s a can of coconut milk, not cream. The whole can isn’t going in, just ¼ of a cup for richness. Then, the big can is tomato puree, which is different than tomato sauce or tomato paste in ways I don’t fully understand other than “I assume this is just pureed tomatoes”. Lastly, 2 cans of kidney beans, which, once rinsed and drains, is pretty much exactly 3 cups, which is what the recipe calls for.

Lid comes off, in goes the dump stuff, and you’re just stirring every 30 seconds or so, and tasting to check balance. This is where I ended up adding the additional curry paste, as well as more cumin, and two less reasonable suggestions of cayenne pepper and ghost pepper powder to bring the spice level to somewhere I was a little more interested. I think I also added garlic powder, and DEFINITELY added some cinnamon (an addition I thought would go well with the sweet potato, and I know isn’t unheard-of in the broader chili community). By adding those little smoky and spicy notes, I brought it closer to the flavor profile I think of as “chili”.

Now, you’re supposed to simmer for 7 minutes, until “bulgur is tender and chili is thick”, but it took me over TWENTY minutes of simmering to get to something I was ready to say “okay, close enough” to. Like, this is what it looked like after 7 minutes:

This looks like Tomato soup, not chili.

That does NOT look NEARLY thick enough to me. And that’s why I’m suggesting less vegetable broth, since I think cooking that out was the reason it took so long, though you might also want to reduce the amount of tomato puree. IN the end, this is how it looked in the bowls.

It was still a little wet for me, but at least it LOOKS like chili.

As for taste…It’s very hard to explain. Because it tastes like chili. There’s beans, cumin, spiciness. But it also DOESN’T. You get a hint of the coconut, and it’s a little sweeter than you expect, and you can kind of get the cinnamon. Everything melds together quite well, but the result is both familiar and strange. I’d honestly recommend it, but I could also understand someone not liking it. But to me, for a low-effort, quick and vegan meal, it’s kind of amazing. And I think it’d be something cool to try to warm your bellies this winter season.

THURSDAY: I DON’T KNOW. NOTHING IN THIS REALLY LEAPT OUT AS AN INSPIRATION. MAYBE WE’LL DO A MEANDERING AMERICA POST, OR MAYBE I’LL BINGE WATCH A NETFLIX SHOW SINCE TOMORROW’S MY DAY OFF.

MONDAY: NOW WE’RE MAKING THAT CAKE I PROMISED. THINGS ARE GOING TO GET…FROTHY.

Recipe

Modified Vegan Coconut Curry Chili

Ingredients

1 tbsp red curry paste

1 tsp ground cumin

3 cups low-sodium vegetable broth or stock, divided

1/2 cup uncooked bulgur

1/2 medium sweet potato, peeled and cubed (2 cups)

1 large green bell pepper, chopped (2 cups)

3 cups cooked kidney beans or BPA-free canned kidney beans, drained and rinsed well

1/2 cup light coconut milk

2 cups jarred or boxed tomato purée (aka passata)

¼ tsp cinnamon

1/8th tsp chili powder

1/8th tsp cayenne

1/8th tsp smoked ghost pepper powder (optional)

2 scallions, chopped

Fresh ground black pepper, to taste

Preparation

1. In a medium pot, add curry paste, cumin and a bit of broth. Mash mixture and stir until paste is smooth Add remaining broth, bulgur, potato and bell pepper. Set over high heat and bring to a boil. Cover tightly, reduce heat to medium-low and cook for 10 minutes.

2. Add beans, coconut milk and tomato purée to pot and stir. Add spices and stir. Cook, uncovered, for 7 minutes, until bulgur is tender and chili is thick.  Remove from the heat, stir in scallions and black pepper, and serve.