Last night, my daughter wanted soup for dinner. Specifically, she wanted chili. Her exact words: "We had chili at school once and it was delicious." Now, chili recipies vary: some folks add corn or potatoes to give their chili a little starch. Some folks (most that I know) add hamburger meat, which is technically, chili con carne (latin for "with meat") or chicken, or make a "white chili". All chili recipes have two factors in common, though: Pepper and beans. Note, I said, "pepper", not "peppers", although most contain actual pepper meats, some only contain pepper spice or dried pepper, or "chili seasonings" which is a generic-store concotion containing, among other things, pepper. After a thorough search of my cupboards, refrigerator, and freezers, I found a lack of both. I did have a bag of dried kidney beans, but they needed to soak for at least an hour and it was already 5 o'clock. So last night, I made our actual dinner, a very quick one, then started the chili so I could serve it tonight. It didn't hurt that today was a day off of work for me, which meant I'd be able to work on it all day.
As I said, I began by soaking the dehydrated beans, which I did by covering them in cold water, bringing them to a rolling boil, boiling for 2 minutes, then removing from heat and leaving, hot and covered, for an hour. In short, I followed the directions on the bag. I used a whole bag of dried beans that have been in my cupboard for years. I know, because when I was nursing my now-four-year-old son, I received WIC checks that allowed for a jar of peanut butter or a bag of dried beans. Just once I got the bag of beans, and it has sat in my cupboard for years. Not that dried beans go bad, which is one of their virtues. They're an apocolypse food. Once the beans have soaked and re-hydrated, you rinse them and put them back in your giant chili kettle. Or whatever you have for such things. On top of the beans, I added 1 and a half large onions, diced. 
In a very large skillet, I cooked this entire family-sized pack of hamburger meat, which I bought ages ago for what I can only deduce was $5.57, due to my amazing, Sherlock-Holmes-ish deductive skills. I cooked the meat with 4 spoonfuls of garlic-from-a-jar, stirring every few minutes with a spatula, then used the same spatula to lift the meat out of the grease pool (it was that crazy cheap "less than 78% fat" burger that's got the most fat and grease out of any burger you can buy) rather than get meat grease all over my strainer.
To this I added a family-sized (32-oz) can of diced tomatoes, and put the whole thing in the fridge (with a lid) for today. As I said before, today, I had the day off, so I went to the store with the kids and got 3 bell peppers, one red, one green, one yellow, for $3.69. They were packaged together for $4.59 but, with a little bit of math, I found I could save 90 cents by buying them separately. If I bought Birds Eye frozen stir-fry mix, I could get the bag for $3.59, but (a) it would have onions in it and I already added onions, and (b) it would cost more per pound since the frozen bag was only about 60% of the weight of the fresh peppers and (c) I would still have to dice them since they were pepper and onion strips not diced chunks which is what you (or at least I) put in chili. So I spent 20 minutes in the store with 3 kids on the peppers alone. (grumble) The only good thing is that after I diced all three peppers I only needed to use about half of them, so I was able to put the remaining diced pepper in a freezer bag for later use.
So, today, I added the fresh diced bell peppers and the seasonings, which for me included 7 beef bullion cubes, a little worchestire sauce, (I always have to spell-check that one) another spoonful of garlic, salt, pepper, paprika, chili seasoning, basil, and, because I decided it wasn't "tomato-y" enough, but putting in another jumbo can of tomatoes would be too much, I added a jar of my favorite spaghetti sauce. This also added a bit of flavor that wouldn't have been there before, but she tasted, and she saw that it was good. I brought it to a boil, then took it down to slightly more than "simmer" on my stove's dial (a "three", for those who care about such things). I left it on "simmer" for over an hour. (Oh, and added some water so it wouldn't dry up and stirred it every twenty minutes, so that the stuff on the bottom wouldn't burn permanantly to the kettle)
When it was done (about 1 pm today) I removed it from the heat and let it cool to room temp, then put it in the fridge. I didn't put it right in the fridge because I didn't want to over-work my fridge trying to cool down my milk and butter and fresh fruit AND a big kettle of something that was just boiling. Anyway, at about 4 pm I took the now-cooled kettle out and ladeled it into plastic quart-sized "zippered freezer storage bags" which is a nice way of saying generic ziploc. I did this, by the way, by putting a bag in a 32-ounce tumbler and ladeling into the cup. This kept soup from getting all over the outside of the bag. 
This resulted in 4 bags of chili for another day (or another 4 days, as it were) and left me with enough chili in the bottom of the pot to serve with dinner tonight.
Our side dish tonight was cornbread muffins, which is kind of obvious, when you think about it, as THE thing to serve with chili, when the chili is your main course. If your chili is not the main course, of course, then it should be served with something else which will be the main course. Of course.
Sorry about that, I've been watching a lot of VLOGBROTHERS while I waited for my picture of a pepper to load, which it ended up not doing anyway.
So anyway, I made some muffins using a crazy cheap corn muffin mix, which just happened to be the last in my cupboard. I think I bought it for 67 cents (3 for $2). I'm gonna go with that.
And I made them using cupcake wrappers from the cupcake spree of two weeks ago for ease of removal. When all was said and done, we had a satisfying, delicious dinner that only took parts of two days to prepare, and the kids were so filled that they didn't even want dessert, which was store-bought butterscotch pudding, but which they will happily eat, I am sure, very, very soon.
The cost of tonight's dinner must be calculated as a whole, then proportioned: The beans were technically free for me, since they were a WIC product (given away by the PA government for nursing mothers and mothers of young children - I don't even know if they give away beans any more) but I'm going to assume that someone buying beans would have to pay $2.50 for them, since that's what I think I paid last time I bought a jumbo can of beans. The meat was $5.57, the peppers $3.69, but I saved half in the freezer for later use, so I used $1.85 worth of peppers tonight, and the onions, sold in a 3 pound bag (about 5 medium-sized onions) for $1.99, of which I only used 1 and a half onions, came to 60 cents. The can of tomatoes was $1.79, and the jar of sauce was $1.67. The random spices and such probably totaled less than 50 cents. Adding that all up, the entire pot of chili cost somewhere around $14.48. Since I used 1/5 of that tonight (four freezer bags plus what I served with dinner) tonight's chili cost $2.90. Now then, the cornbread mix cost 67 cents, and I used all of it, plus 1/3 cup of milk and 1 egg (honestly, practically nothing - if a dozen eggs is $1.79 each egg is 15 cents, and eggs at Costas were a dollar saver item this week, which meant they were less than that even), plus "fake butter" (spread, actually called "A change for the butter") that I mixed with honey in a re-used (as in reduce reuse recycle) yogurt cup to make a honey butter spread, so I'm gonna round that 67 cents up to $1. The pudding that nobody ate was made from a SureFine pudding mix (mixed with whole milk and cooled in the fridge for 5 minutes according to the box, 20 minutes in real life) and cost 69 cents. So the total of dinner plus dessert was $4.59.
There was even about 16 oz of soup left over tonight, and 2 cornbread muffins, which I offered to a neighbor. So goodnight to all my Potter County neighbors, who need a little warmth on this "chili" spring evening.
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