Slow Cooked Beef Chili

June 20, 2010

Let's try an analogy: Dads are to beef as bees are to honey. Either that makes sense to you or you're considering what my SAT verbal score could have been.

When I asked friends and acquaintances which foods their dads cooked well, it was always the two "B"s: Beef and Breakfast. Time and time again, Dad was painted as a meat-eating morning person. Are dads limited to grilled steaks and scrambled eggs? Of course not. Is every man with a few tots running around a meat eater? No. But overwhelmingly, and perhaps undeservingly, men and meat get tied together.

My own dad is one such man. A carnivore with culinary prowess that rivals Julia Child and gives Emeril a run for his money. And though he can cook nearly everything indexed in the Foodista Food 500 Project, he specializes in beef. Perhaps it was years as a butcher, or just a taste for a top notch cut of meat, but when I want to dine on a perfectly seared New York Strip- he's the guy I go to.

So this Father's Day, I'm paying tribute to the carnivorous connoisseur in my life with a recipe that features fork tender pieces beef, slowly simmered in a tomato sauce that is all at once smoky, spicy, and sweet. A chunky and rich beef chili to remember.

Slow cooking the chili brings out the best qualities of the savory stew. The hours spent bubbling in a pot allow for the flavors to marry, the beef to tenderize, and the vegetables to absorb the rich depth of the spicy chili powder, cumin, and paprika. It's the kind dish that you love to eat the day after cooking- when the taste has intensified ten fold.

And because it's so simple and hands-off, you'll have all the more time to spend with the special men in your life today. Enjoy!