I took my new slow cooker for its maiden voyage today with a big ol’ batch of chili. This is how I did it.

• Pour a can of chicken stock and a can of beef stock into the cooker and set it to high. It might not have been a bad idea to heat those up in a saucepan to help the slow cooker get up to heat faster.
• Cut a large sweet onion into half inch slices. Put all but one of those slices under a broiler along with a few anaheim peppers to char a bit. If you want a lot of heat, use jalapenos or whichever pepper you like.
• Mince up that last onion slice, a little more garlic than you’d think is enough, and a two or three inch piece of ginger root while heating up some oil in your biggest skillet.
• Throw about half of your pile of minced onion, garlic, and ginger into the skillet and give the anaheim peppers down in the broiler a quarter turn to char their skins evenly.
• Once the onions soften, throw a couple pounds of ground beef in the skillet and brown it evenly while breaking it up into little crumbles. I use a bamboo spatula thing for this. Shaking some paprika, salt, and a little bit of hot pepper flakes in that cooking beef is a good idea, too.
• While that’s going on, keep turning those peppers and pull the suckers out when they’re charred all over. Toss them from the broiler into a paper bag and roll the top closed to seal in the steam. Give it a few shakes and leave it in there for a couple of minutes and the skins will fall off real easy-like. Dice the skinless peppers off and add them to the chili. Open up a couple cans of stewed tomatoes and throw them into slow-cooker with the broth. I used diced tomatoes for this batch, but next time I’ll use whole tomatoes and let them chunk up one stirring. Add a can of tomato paste or two and stir it up. That’ll ensure the chili’s base will taste unimaginably good. The onions should be carmelized down in the broiler, so pull them out and let them cool a bit.
• The beef is browned, so drain that and throw it in the cooker pot.
• Start up some fresh oil and throw in the rest of that minced onion/garlic/ginger. When the onions soften, throw a pound of ground pork in the skillet and brown it like you did with the beef, adding paprika and a little salt and pepper. The last time I made chili, I cubed up a pound of pork steak and used that instead of ground beef. If you do it that way, you can savor the difference in meats more easily—whatever your preference. When I was buying groceries for this batch o’ chili, I was strongly tempted to pick up a pound of tripe for a super-tasty third “meat” that would add some serious texture and flavor to the chili. I chose against that since I hope to share this batch with people who may find eating such things repulsive, but I’ll likely do it next time. I’ve never cooked tripe before, but I’d probably slice it up into small squares and sautee it with the onion/ginger/garlic mix like with the pork and beef before adding it to the cooker.
• By now, the chili in the slow cooker is probably boiling already, or close to it. Put the skillet on the stove for the last time and heat it up with a little oil. Slice up the charred onion sliced and saute ‘em until soft, then throw them into the chili pot. Hopefully, you’ve got some crispy stuff left in the skillet from browning all that beef and pork. Crack open the oldest, skunkiest beer in your fridge and pour it into the skillet. Crack open a decent beer and take a swig, if it’s after noon. Bring the beer in the skillet to a boil and use your spatula to scrape up all the crispy bits into the brew, then pour that into the slow cooker.
• Stir that up and give it a taste. Add some of your favorite hot sauce. I used a few shakes of el Yucateco Habanero Sauce, less than I would have if this batch was for me alone. Turn the heat down to low, add some bay leaves, and let that stuff simmer for a couple of hours, stirring occasionally.
• There’s a good chance your wife or someone will sneak a taste of your chili and proclaim that it’s too freaking spicy for them to eat. If this happens and you want to do something about it, here’s a tip that’s worth trying—not sure where I heard it. Pour a tablespoon or two of vegetable oil into the chili and stir it in real good, then let it simmer for a while without stirring it. You see, capsaicin is oil-soluble/hydrophobic, that’s why drinking water doesn’t do a good job of getting an overpoweringly spicy taste out of your mouth, but fat-containing milk works pretty well. If you pour a little oil in there, the capsaicin will get soaked up in the oil and rise to the top of the chili. You can spoon it out and—voila—the chili will be less hot and you’ll have some really nice hot oil that you can use to stir fry a crazy spicy vegetable side later on. I’d refrigerate it, though. I’ve never been married, so I’ve never had to use that trick myself, but I don’t see any problems with the theory.
• Whenever your patience fails, the chili is ready to eat. You can pick out the bay leaves if you want, but I leave mine in and just avoid them. Turn the slow-cooker down to warm and serve up some chili. I like mine on rice, covered with shredded cheese and a dollop of sour cream.

Now in the summertime, you can do a little better. I like to use roma tomatoes and hot peppers from the garden instead of canned tomatoes and store-bought peppers (you still need the tomato paste, though). Instead of charring the peppers and onion with the broiler, I toast them (and the tomatoes) on the backyard grill. Super tasty.

I thought I’d get into La Russa’s spirit of putting 2006 behind us and focusing on 2007 by replacing my desktop wallpaper (formerly Adam Wainwright on the mound with the team rushing out to tackle him) with the 2007 schedule image from Redbird Central. I don’t know who runs that website, but there’s some good new stuff there.

The Cardinals will have their first real game tomorrow against the Florida Marlins. Last season, MLB.com was providing the gameday data, but no links to the gameday apps for each game. After inducing the naming convention they use, I was able to post links to the gamedays that I’d put on this page and in the comments at VeB. If they only changed the obvious things, it should show up here. I expect to have it figured out by noon, if they are indeed hosting the data again. I’m hoping they beta-test the Enhanced Gameday during Spring Training games. Tangotiger discussed the new system here and Derrick Goold wrote glowingly about it here. The gameday developers have their own blog, too, with plenty of links to other mentions. Alas, no talk of rolling it out for ST that I saw.

One more thing. I find Jill Wagner so attractive that I don’t mind a bit the obnoxious mouseover ads on every webpage hosted by the Post-Dispatch. Ordinarily, they’d piss me off, but when I’m reading an article about Albert Pujols taking BP with wrassler Kurt Angle and suddenly an advertisement covers up the text, my moment of mild irritation disappears when I see that it’s just Jill popping in to say hello and to remind me to buy a Mercury Mariner. I still think it’s hilarious that the only successful advertising campaign any Ford company (not including light trucks) that I can think of can credit only a beautiful model and a boner joke. If they wish to follow up on that success, they might model their next Volvo campaign after this one you probably shouldn’t watch at work.