meat, three-day cooking adventure
I've been feeling depressed lately so I decided it was time to drown the noise in an arduous cooking project.
I've made many wonderful chilis in my time but I always used store-bought stocks/broths when doing so, and I always thought it would be fun to make a homemade stock, so that's what I'll be doing today
Here we have a whole chicken, ham hocks, half an onion, carrots and celery, and some smash garlic that are hiding under the other ingredients. Normally when I make chicken stock I add whole allspice and other warming ingredients (I recently tried a cinnamon stick and that was wonderful) but I don't think I want those flavors in this chili. So instead I'm using whole peppercorns and sichuan peppercorns. We'll see how it turns out!
I've never done this with ham hocks before but I've used them in a number of red bean recipes and I really like the subtle flavor they add, and they're cheap
I have one more thing I'm preparing today that I will use some of the stock for, so you can look forward to that 
re: meat, three-day cooking adventure
The stock is done. I cooked it for a very long time (at least 2.5 hours), pulling out the meat once it started falling off the bone, letting it cool, stripping away the skin and bones and overly fatty bits, and then throwing the bones back in. It's delicious
Normally when I make chili like this I end up using four cups of stock but I only have three cups (see attached image), but since this is heavily reduced it will be perfectly fine if I add some water to the chili if necessary.
Now, on to the next step!
re: meat, three-day cooking adventure
Next, as opposed to using a chili powder, we'll make a chili paste from dried chilies
Here I took 2 ancho chilis, 2 guajillo chilis, 2 cascabells, and 1 arbol chili and deseeded them and stripped them into little pieces. (Some say the seeds make things to spicy, others claim they can make the result too bitter. I've never tested these claims but have always deseeded them anyway, let me know if you have any insight!) We toast them a bit to bring out a little extra flavor and then simmer them in some of our chicken stock (I used a little more than one cup) until they are soft
In general I find I prefer to make meals like this quite a bit below my preferred spice level because they tend to get a lot spicier after a few days in the fridge. If I spice the dish to my preferred amount the day I make it, it is way too spicy two days later. On the other hand, I can always pump up the spice with hot sauce when I eat it at the table.
For this reason all of the chilis here are not very spicy, aside from the arbol of which I only used one
re: meat, three-day cooking adventure
I forgot to mention that I shredded the chicken and chopped the ham hocks and am saving that meat for later. I didn't take any pictures so you will just have to imagine it
re: meat, three-day cooking adventure
The final task for tonight is simple: let's soak some beans for tomorrow.
I'm using three red varieties from Rancho Gordo that are great for stews: the leftmost is "mother stallard" which have this beautiful white speckled pattern and are extremely creamy for beans that hold their shape in stews, the top right is "Domingo Rojo" which are like a cooler kidney bean, they're very very big, very very tasty, and hold their shape wonderfully and make an incredibly rich starchy broth when cooked, and "Red Hidasta" which are basically your standard "small mexican red bean".
I'm using a 1/2 cup of the the top right and 1/4 cups of the others for a total of 1 cup of dried beans, which is something close to four cans of canned beans. This is gonna be a massive meal
I add some salt to the water, which I always do and I have no idea why. I've never tested what happens if I don't add the salt. If you have any insight do let me know!
re: meat, three-day cooking adventure
now it's time clean the dishes 
re: meat, three-day cooking adventure
@coriander hey cori, i put you in my chili
re: meat, three-day cooking adventure
After this I toasted 2 tbsp of cumin seeds and 1 tbsp of coriander (last time I did this I felt the coriander was a bit too pronounced so I'm using less than I normally use) and then ground them up in a mortar and pestle
After that I added 1 tbsp soy sauce, 1 tbsp marmite, 1 tbsp fish sauce (this amount does not leave any fishy flavor whatsoever), a healthy squeeze of tomato paste (I didn't measure it but it was probably 1-2 tbsp), 1 tbsp of adobo sauce from the can of chipotle, and 1 chopped chipotle pepper to the dried chili + stock and blended it all up. I removed the cap from the blender and covered it with a towel since blending hot liquids can cause can weird things to happen with the pressure inside the blender and cause dangerous explosions
The result is incredible tasty (if not a bit salty, although this will be seasoning a massive amount of food later). The amount of umami might even be illegal
