Pumpkin Turkey Chili

Chili is one of my all-time favorite foods. I associate it with my dad’s cooking (mom made pot roast, dad made venison chili) and it’s almost always better with cornbread. When the weather gets cold, soup and stew are excellent companions and chili is no exception. In my case, I decided to incorporate the aforementioned popular ingredient of pumpkin and it make it slightly healthier by making turkey chili. Note: I did not take any liberties with the ingredients ie: the turkey, the recipe is actually for pumpkin turkey chili, no shenanigans here. Scrolling through the recipe you will find it requires several canned goods which at first made me question if this is ‘homemade’ enough to be ventured. But after careful consideration of the fact that I would in fact have to chop things and cook the meat, it passed my oh so easy test. The only liberty I took was the fact that I don’t have a dutch oven nor a large pot to substitute. But I do have a frying pan thing (I’m not sure what the proper term is but I invested in this non-stick thing last year when I realized my college frying pan thing was poorly designed and tipped over a lot. See I made progress!).

Pretty straight forward. That is also the infamous fail-cutting 'board'.

Number one: I’m terrible at chopping onions. They make me bawl and go blind halfway through the onion which makes it way more difficult to chop the second half especially since I don’t have a cutting board—I have a cutting mat which does tend to slide around. Injury is imminent. Knowing my failure with onions, I tried once to have someone chop them for me. This resulted in them cutting their finger so now I chop the onions. Maybe I’m actually crying out of frustration of getting the skin off of the onion or the mat slipping but I digress.

Anyways, the ingredients go into the pot, they cook, we add more ingredients, they smell yummy. And hten we add a few more…and a few more and soon this pan is obviously reaching capacity. But does this stop me? No! What’s the worst that can happen? A little mess, no big deal. I soon came to realize that what can happen is I can’t stir it and everything will boil over. So being sensible (and cursing myself thinking “I really don’t think it was wise to add that water!”), I bailed out the pan. As in took a bowl and a spoon and ladled out water off the top so I could stir without setting anything on fire. So there was a lot of hissing, some small flames got excited about having food to fuel it. In the end, it turned out delicious!

For the life of me, I can't get this to rotate (or save rotated, rather). But you get the idea. Hot mess.

Pumpkin turkey chili was a great success and has sustained me for about a week. It’s also yummy with sour cream. I know the jingle calls for a dollop but realistically, it’s a metric spoon of sour cream. Perfect on this rainy night! And ultimately, the stove and pan lived to see another day, a little cleaner for the wear. 

The final product! Messy, overflowing but delicious.