The Pubilx in the strip mall at the SE corner of Glades and 441 did indeed have Muir Glen canned tomato products with expiration dates in the 2014 range. I had to stare at the shelf a while in shock before I remembered that store has a separate Greedwise (organic shading into nutrition quackery) section, but remember I did. havng done it once and thought over procedure, I'm a lot more confident in the recipe now, so I went with double-recipe can sizes.

Also a 1.5L bottle of Sutter Home merlot (on sale, $2.10 off regular $10.99). Hot damn, that's delicious. And a bunch of bananas, one of which I gave to one of the homeless working the median on 441. I figured a banana would be a good accompaniment to my morning muffin and peanut butter. Breakfast is supposed to be the biggest meal of the day but problem is, breakfast time I'm almost always feeling too sluggish to make much in the way of breakfast. Certainly not industrious enough to whip up scramble wraps. Anyway -

Quick-soaked pinto beans. I did find a bug (ONE bug, not, like, 20 bugs) on sorting, despite the fact they've been sealed away for what, 2 weeks now? Looked like a hatchling cockroach and I'm going to go ahead and believe that it got in while I was sorting, not hanging out among my beans since I bought them or before. I disposed of it, carefully re-inspected the lot to my satisfaction, rinsed 2 passes in cool water, boiled 2 minutes and let sit/cool an hour, drained and rinsed some more, and sealed the rinsed, boiled, drained, re-rinsed pintos in a food storage bin.

Then I busted out the rest of the somewhat-less-than-2# block of remaining frozen ground turkey, and plopped it in my 3qt saucepan to defrost and cook down. Per the intermission notes, cooked this until it was no longer pink on the outside, broke it up some, let it cook more thoroughly, added 2 tsp jarred minced garlic, and... pouring off grease as planned turned out to not really be an option at this stage. Added the frozen remains of last batch's small-fist-size onion, and let it cook down yet more.

Cooking it down to the point where it wasn't swimming in liquid took HOURS. Maybe if I'd upped the heat more it would have dried out faster, but there's a fine line between browning and burning, and I'd rather not gallop along that edge at this stage of my cooking career.

I take back what I said about cumin being an "iconic" chili spice - on reflection it reminds me more of lime and cilantro - ergo, salsa, not chili. But I decided I'd give it another chance, in a recipe where I actually took the raw edge off the onion and garlic before adding tomato stuff, and where beans are available to complete the recipe as intended. I did swap out the black pepper for cayenne though.

The base recipe called for adding canned beans after an hour of chili simmering and then simmering 10 minutes more. I elected to add quick-soaked-but-not-yet-cooked beans after the other ingredients had been simmering for 15-20 minutes and ignore the part about that last 10 minutes. Pretty pleased with the results. Either I've become accustomed to cumin or I slightly overdid it the first time around; cayenne instead of red pepper is a win; sadly, this is still not a dish that can be started at 6:30 or so and cooled enough to store by bedtime. Might have to work out some compromise solutions involving browning and storing the meat/onion/garlic step one night, and simmering long-time the following night.