Guinness Chili con Carne ReMake

A few years ago, I got ambitious and made a huge pot of chili con carne. It was amazing. I used a couple of bottles of Guinness stout as the liquid, and oh, my! This Guinness Chili con Carne filled my large crock pot to the very top with goodness.

Guinness Chili con Carne

But, not everyone needs a huge pot that will feed up to 12 people, and on more normal days I use a scaled down version. While I am not using all the extra Anaheim chilies, nor the third pound of meat, it can be customized and still have amazing, rich flavors, and still use the Guinness. I am fond of using Guinness stout in cooking, though I don't care for it as a drink. My taste in beer runs to the very bitter and very hoppy types. Guinness is just too "sweet" for my taste. Used in cooking though, it imparts a wonderfully rich, round flavor and depth. 

On normal days, making chili just for my husband and me, I scale the recipe back and use 2 pounds of meat. This still gives us dinner for a few days, which is great. I always use a pound of hamburger meat, and then alternate between using plain ground pork or pork sausage as the second pound of meat. I usually buy sweet Italian sausage, but hot Italian sausage can be substituted if you prefer the heat. If using sausages, remove from the casings and break up the meat as it cooks, as with the hamburger meat. 

My husband loves beans. I mean he LOVES beans. So when I would make this chili with one can of kidney beans, he asked if maybe I could add in another can of them, please? So, I use two cans of beans, but obviously this is a matter of taste. 

Up here in South Dakota, we just had our lovely spring-like weather turn into a blizzard this morning. It's still snowing, since early this AM. It seems like a really great time to make this Guinness Chili con Carne to me!

Guinness Chili con Carne

Serves 6 to 8 

Guinness Chili con Carne

3 - 4 slices bacon 
1 pound ground beef
1 pound ground pork or pork sausage
1 large onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 green bell pepper, chopped
2 small (4-ounce) cans "chopped green chilies" 
2 tablespoons chili powder
2 teaspoons Barbecue Spice Mix, optional
2 teaspoons Kosher salt
1 - 2 bay leaves
¾ teaspoon dried oregano leaves or 2 teaspoons fresh leaves, minced
½ teaspoon cumin seeds, crushed
½ teaspoon fennel seeds, crushed
1 (15-ounce) can tomato sauce
2 (6-ounce) cans tomato paste
1 or 2 (15-ounce) cans dark red kidney beans, drained & rinsed
1 bottle Guinness Stout

Heat a large soup pot. Cut the bacon across in ¼-inch widths and saute the bacon in the pan. Remove the bacon to drain on paper toweling, leaving 1 to 2 tablespoons of the bacon grease in the pot. Add in the ground beef. If using ground pork, add this in also. If using sausage, either use bulk sausage or Italian sausage. If using links, remove from casings. Break the meat up in the pot and fry until browned. Add in the onion, garlic and bell pepper and toss well until softened. Add in the chopped green chilies, chili powder, Barbecue Spice Mix, salt, bay leaves, oregano, cumin and fennel and stir in. Add in the tomato sauce and paste, then the kidney beans, reserved bacon and the Guinness stout. Stir well and bring to a simmer. Cover with a lid and allow to simmer on low for at least 30 minutes or up to an hour, stirring occasionally to prevent the chili from sticking to the pot.

Serve hot with cornbread on the side. Garnish with sour cream, shredded cheddar and/or chopped onion.


My passion is teaching people how to create a harmony of flavors with their cooking, and passing along my love and joy of food, both simple or exotic, plain or fancy. I continue my journey in ethnic and domestic cuisines, continuing my journey to explore diverse culinary experiences and hopefully to start you on a journey of your own. Join me also at A Harmony of Flavors on Facebook, and Pinterest.

Updates & Recipes

My new Book

Starter just mixed: Day 1 and Day 2

Yesterday I wrote about my excitement with the new influx of cookbooks to my shelves, mainly about bread baking. I started out almost right away, making a "Seed Starter" from scratch. I am fishing entirely for wild yeasts to ferment my starter, so there is no commercial yeast added at all to give it a boost. The particular book I am following for this recipe (The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart) calls for starting out using 1 cup of white rye flour mixed well with ¾ cup of water on the first day. He explains that there may be little, if any, activity in the first 24 hours. On the next day, we mix together 1 cup of bread flour with ½ cup of water and combine this with the mixture from day 1. There is still anticipated to be very little action in the starter after the second 24 hours (tomorrow morning). Tomorrow morning, I will discard half of the starter already made (the option being to share with a friend who is into this same thing, so they might pick up the ball and continue from this point). Again I will mix together 1 cup bread flour with ½ cup water and combine with the remaining starter. It is anticipated that this time there will be a bit of fermentation taking place. I will keep tabs on that. On Day 4 it will repeat again. For the time being, I am anxiously awaiting the wild yeasts who will presumably work their magic. For now it is a boring enterprise, but I have faith!

For now, I have a couple of recipes I wanted to post, but realized that in all the hullabaloo surrounding the arrival of 4 guys into the house for a week and the Wine Tasting Event that happened on April 12th, while I was cooking nonstop, I entirely forgot to get photos of some of my finished meals. I made a most excellent Chicken Curry one evening and Naan. Since I made the Naan breads while the guys were out fishing, I did take photos of the finished product. The Chicken Curry however, was completely gone before I realized I had no photos. I made buns and potato salad earlier in the day while they guys were fishing, so I got photos. The pulled pork was finished just as they arrived home for dinner. RI will post the recipe for the pulled pork as it turned out so very good.  My pork roast had been frozen. I left it in the fridge overnight, but it was still frozen in the center when I started the roast in the crock pot.

Pulled Pork BBQ on Homemade Buns

Pulled Pork

Serves about 8 or more

1 (4.5 pound) pork shoulder roast
1 large onion, quartered, thinly sliced
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 tablespoon coriander seed, crushed
1 tablespoon paprika
1 teaspoon cumin seed, crushed
1½ teaspoons salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
½ teaspoon dried thyme leaves
1 (12-ounce) bottle Guinness Stout or other liquid of choice
1½ to 2 cups Barbecue Sauce of choice

At around 8 or 9 AM, set the onions into a crock pot and set the pork roast on top of the onions. Combine all the spices together and sprinkle them over the meat. Pour on the entire Guinness Stout, cover the crock pot and set on High for 8 hours. If your roast is not frozen, you may set the crock pot on Low for the full time, or switch to Low about midway through the cooking time. I have a Crock Pot with a removable heavy crockery insert. If your slow cooker is thin walled, you may need to adjust cooking time.

Once the meat is cooked through and falling-apart-tender, remove the meat from the pot and set on a plate to cool slightly. If the remaining liquid in the crock pot is more than 1 cup, pour the liquid into a saucepan and cook over medium high heat until reduced to about 1 cup of liquid. Add the barbecue sauce to the liquid and stir to combine. Set aside.

Using 2 forks, pull the pork apart into ragged shreds. Add the pork to the sauce in the pan and toss well to combine. Serve on buns with a side of Mustard Potato Salad and Coleslaw.

Basic Coleslaw

Basic Coleslaw

Makes about 6 - 8 servings

8 cups shredded cabbage
1 carrot, peeled, shredded
¾ cup mayonnaise
¼ cup vinegar
¼ cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
a few grinds good quality pepper

Place cabbage and carrot in a large bowl. In a smaller bowl, whisk together the remaining ingredients and pour over cabbage, combining well.


If you love pasta salads, there is a recipe I made recently that is good without mayonnaise if preferred, although I do add a little for the creaminess it imparts. I do use Dijon Mustard in the salad. I note this because I have a sister who hates both mayo and mustard. For anyone out there with this same dilemma, I have no idea what I would substitute for the mustard in this recipe. Maybe pickle relish? It would need something suitably piquant to compensate for the missing mustard flavor. 

My passion is teaching people how to create a harmony of flavors with their cooking, and passing along my love and joy of food, both simple or exotic, plain or fancy. I continue my journey in ethnic and domestic cuisines, continuing my journey to explore diverse culinary experiences and hopefully to start you on a journey of your own. Join me also at A Harmony of Flavors on Facebook, and Pinterest.

Beef Rump Roast in a Crock Pot

Crock Pot Rump Roast

Thank goodness for Crock Pots. They allow for things that could be difficult otherwise. Things like setting and forgetting. I have been busy working on a cookbook that I wish could be published someday, and as I am the author, typesetter, graphic artist and photographer, it is going slowly. So I work on it daily, mainly because I really enjoy doing all those things. Cooking is still required in order to make the recipes, so I must keep at it. Some days are more inspired than others, and yesterday wasn't one of the more brilliant days. I have a freezer full of a side of beef, which in this weather comes down to making things like roasts, stews or spaghetti. My husband has had tooth problems on and off for months, so he doesn't want to eat the roasts, as it hurts to chew. So, what to do?

I decided to chance it. I pulled a Rump Roast out of the freezer yesterday morning. It was like a rock, and would likely take at least a day to thaw properly. So - here comes the crock pot! I have never really had a "recipe" for a roast in the crock pot. Some days the thing comes out tastier than others, but they are all good. Yesterday, though I didn't feel terribly inspired to begin with, and was running low on groceries (something I remedied today), the roast and its gravy were just plain delicious. 

A serving of the roast with gravy

I had no potatoes in the house, so I just set some carrots in the bottom of the crock pot, as a sort of rack. Since the meat was frozen solid, I wanted to give it some space underneath for the heat to circulate. I set the frozen roast on top of the carrots and stepped back to think; what would taste good with the roast?

The first thing I thought of was the Dry Onion Soup Mix I created a couple of months ago. I still had enough in the jar to use the equivalent of one store-bought envelope, so I measured out the 1/4 cup of the mix and strewed it over the meat.  I tossed in a bay leaf. Then, because I wanted to make gravy later, I added in about 1 teaspoon of Kitchen Bouquet to make sure the color of the gravy would be good. I have Guinness Stout in my pantry, for cooking purposes (I like beer on occasion, but not Guinness Stout for drinking), so I poured one bottle in onto the roast. Then, because I wanted a rich color and flavor, I added in about 1/2 cup ketchup. I put the lid on and turned the pot to high. This was at 8:30 AM. Meanwhile, this is my recipe for the Dry Onion Soup Mix:

Dry Onion Soup Mix

4 Recipes of Dry Onion Soup Mix

Makes ¼ cup, equal to about one packet. Reconstitute with 4 cups liquid.

3 tablespoons dried minced onion
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon sugar, optional
½ teaspoon garlic powder
¼ teaspoon turmeric
¼ teaspoon celery seeds, crushed or ground
¼ - ½ teaspoon black pepper

Mix all ingredients together and store in a glass jar in a cool dark place.

If mixing up more than one batch at a time for future use, be sure to mix thoroughly before using, as the onion will tend to surface and the finer ingredients will sink.
About 1 PM I came downstairs to check on the roast. I did not uncover the pot, but the house was smelling really wonderful, so I figured I had done something right! I turned the temperature to low and went back upstairs to work. 

At 4 PM I came back down and removed the lid from the crock pot. The roast was completely cooked! I removed the roast from the pot and set it aside and poured off the liquid into a saucepan. I did not strain the liquid, as there were all the reconstituted onion bits and other good things in there, but if preferred, it could have been strained. I mixed up about 3/4 cup of water with about 4 - 5 tablespoons of flour (or so - I wasn't measuring). I put this into one of those Tupperware containers with the little insert so it blends the flour and water well. With the saucepan at a simmer, I whisked in the flour and water slurry, whisking while the mixture thickened. As I was not measuring anything, I cannot say how much of the slurry I used - most of it - and the amount of liquid in the pan had originally been about about 3 - 4 cups. 

Here I must interject - neither my husband not I have a gluten intolerance, and if making things normally, I use wheat flour to thicken gravies. If one were to make this roast with gluten free gravy, substitute cornstarch for the thickening agent.

I let the gravy simmer for a few minutes, stirring occasionally, so the flour was cooked. The color was beautiful. The gravy tasted just wonderful. I served the meat and gravy with some rice (with a pinch of saffron, just because), and it was one delicious meal!



My passion is teaching people how to create a harmony of flavors with their cooking, and passing along my love and joy of food, both simple or exotic, plain or fancy. I continue my journey in ethnic and domestic cuisines, continuing my journey to explore diverse culinary experiences and hopefully to start you on a journey of your own. Join me also at A Harmony of Flavors on Facebook, and Pinterest.

Bread Bowls as Party Appetizers - Super Bowl or Other

My Kitchen Aid Mixer Bread

While Super Bowl is coming soon, there are always parties, get-togethers and celebrations to plan for. The other day, my husband was talking about bread bowls as a concept. I have eaten at places that use bread bowls for a soup or stew, but have never made them. I had just made some really delicious Guinness Chili con Carne a couple of days prior, and that recipe uses 3 pounds of meat, so there was plenty left. I figured I would make some bread bowls and see how they worked. 

My Kitchen Aid Mixer Bread Bowl, Chili inside

I make all our bread here at home. Once in a while I do buy buns for burgers or Sloppy Joes, but often I make buns, also. We were out of bread and it was time to make a batch, so I started as usual, with what I call My Kitchen Aid Mixer Bread. Not an advertisement for a Kitchen Aid, per se, though I love mine, but since that is what I use nowadays to make my bread, that is what I called it. The recipe is an adaptation of a lovely, rich egg bread that came from my Mom and Grandma. It is so great for everything, like sliced bread for sandwiches or toast, cloverleaf or other roll shapes, doughnuts, buns. This time I was going to try the bread bowls. 


As it turned out, for a single serving, one loaf of bread will make 4 bread bowls. I used a little more flour than usual, to make them a bit more hearty, the better to withstand hot chili inside. These turned out wonderfully, and with the chili inside they were, well, pretty as a picture. This was wonderful and heartening, so I decided to try this out with my Tuscan Italian Bread recipe, below.  

Tuscan Italian Bread Bowl

I love this recipe for Tuscan Italian Bread, because it is just slightly soured. A simple starter can be made 1 to 3 days in advance, giving it just enough time to make the flavor interesting. It is wonderful with an Italian or other flavorful meal. I made it, allowing a two day start this time. I used one half of the dough, since this recipe makes 2 loaves. I divided it into two sections, but they seemed so very small, so I thought instead I would just make 2 bread bowls out of that one loaf. 


Well! These grew a lot. More than I thought they might. Maybe I was just not thinking clearly, because I know for a fact this bread makes two very nice sized loaves. Surely, dividing the one loaf into 4 pieces should have been fine. It will be, in the future. In the meantime, these half-loaf sized bowls are nicer as a serving type bread bowl. Today I made my husband's favorite dip, with process cheese and a can of chili. I put it into the remaining Italian Bread bowl and yum. While I am not over fond of process cheese and cans of chili, it was sure good with this bread.

Tuscan Italian Bread 

Makes 2 loaves

Tuscan Italian Bread

1 cup water, warm
1 tablespoon yeast
1 cup all-purpose flour
1¼ teaspoons yeast
¼ cup water, warm
1 cup water, warm
3½ cups unbleached flour
1¼ teaspoons salt

Make Starter: Mix 1 cup warm water with yeast and let proof for 5 to 10 minutes. Add 1 cup flour and mix well, about 5 minutes. Cover with plastic wrap and place in a warm place on the counter to rise from 1 to 3 days.

On the day you are ready to work with the bread, mix the 1¼ teaspoon dry yeast and the ¼ cup warm water. Let proof about 5 minutes, then add the extra 1 cup warm water. Add to the starter and mix well. (At this point, the mixture can be placed in the bowl of a heavy duty stand mixer with dough hook to proceed. Add in the flour and salt and set at speed 2 for 10 minutes.) Add the flour and when it holds together, knead on a floured surface for 5 to 10 minutes. Return to bowl and coat with olive oil. Let rise about 2 hours or until doubled in bulk.


Prepare pans by greasing and sprinkling with cornmeal. Punch down dough and shape into two loaves. The loaves can be placed onto a metal former as pictured above, or onto a baking sheet, lengthwise and well separated, or if the taste and flavor of this bread is preferred, but a more structured loaf is desired, use two loaf pans. Let rise. Sprinkle a heated stone or a baking sheet with cornmeal and bake loaf at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes.

NOTES: I have also used this bread to make Bread Bowls. One loaf will make 4 individual bread bowls, or 2 larger bowls that can be used to hold things like dip at a party. 


Making a big batch of chili for a party or other get together is an easy thing to do, especially if you have a large crock pot to keep it warm while the party progresses. These bread bowls are pretty and functional. They can be made well ahead and frozen, to be thawed when needed. If you like to make bread, give these a try, even if you only make 4 out of one loaf worth of bread the first time. Obviously, these are great to use for a family meal also, at any time.

My passion is to teach people how to create a harmony of flavors with their cooking, and help pass along my love and joy of food, both simple and exotic, plain or fancy. I continue my journey in ethnic and domestic cuisines, trying new things weekly. Join me at A Harmony of Flavors on Facebook and Pinterest.