Kaya's Bison Chili

The perfect cure for an unreasonably snowy spring day!

I love chili. Whenever people ask what I'd choose if I could only eat one thing for the rest of my life, I always think about my mom's baked macaroni, but actually say chili. Chili is an extremely flexible dish. You can put pretty much any ingredients or spices into it and create something really tasty. You can serve it over rice, pasta, or just eat it by itself. I'd never had bison chili until we went out west on vacation back when I was in high school, and I pretty much fell in love. I've made things with bison before for the blog, but I just want to say again how good it actually is. It tastes just like beef, but it's better for you in terms of fat and protein, and apparently it's also hypoallergenic! Which is good, because I'm starting to think I might actually be allergic to beef, which is a huge bummer because I happen to like it quite a lot.

Now, obviously this isn't something Kaya would be eating in 1764, but I've been dying to do something like this with her and finally had the perfect opportunity to do so this weekend. For reasons I still don't understand - what did we do to anger you, Mother Nature? - our weekend was cold and snowy, and thus perfect weather for a nice hot bowl of chili.

Bison was a relatively new food source for Kaya and her family in 1764. Her grandmother mentions that when she was a little girl, they didn't own and had never seen horses before, and acquiring domestic animals that facilitated faster travel meant that transporting bison meat and other untreated goods from the plains back to the Pacific North West was actually feasible. Within Kaya's grandmother's lifetime, the world got a little smaller for her family, and hunting and trading in far away places was a lot easier than it had been for her parents and grandparents. Thanks to farming practices and refrigeration, we can enjoy bison pretty much anywhere in the United States. I'm not sure what its availability is overseas, but it's a lot more common to see bison on a menu in an American restaurant than it was years ago.

The other connection this recipe has to Kaya and her favorite foods is the addition of sweet potatoes. I don't really work with a recipe when making chili, mostly because my mom doesn't usually, and I learned from her. Like I said, this is a really flexible meal to cook. If you're working from a recipe and you don't have the specific canned tomatoes? Chop up a fresh one. Subtitute a different can of tomatoes you've got in the pantry. Use an entire can of tomato paste instead of just a table spoon! The possibilities are endless.

But that being said, I did look at a bunch of different recipes for bison chili, and found a lot of them included sweet potatoes! I got excited because while the sweet potatoes we eat aren't exactly like some of the root vegetables Kaya would have eaten, they're pretty much the closest readily available cultivated versions of them, so I decided I was definitely including them.

So while I was inspired by a couple different recipes for bison chili, the combination I went with was pretty much my own. I browned a pound of chopped bison in a pan, and then added it to a slow cooker with a large chopped onion, two peeled and chopped sweet potatoes, a can of red kidney beans, a can of tomato paste, a can of diced tomatoes with chili, a cup and a half of chicken broth and two tablespoons of minced garlic. I added two bay leaves, two tablespoons of chili powder, two teaspoons of salt, a teaspoon of black pepper, two teaspoons of cumin, and a teaspoon of cayenne for the spice. This all got mixed together in a crockpot and was left to cook for six hours.

Seriously, that's literally all you need to do. Prep your ingredients, dump them in a pot and forget about it for six hours. That's the benefit of having a slow cooker!

After six hours, the chili was bubbling and hot, and the meat was fall apart tender. It smelled really good, too!

Some of my taste testers do not like sweet potatoes, and were pretty disappointed to realize how much of them there were in this stew, but I honestly barely even noticed them. The spices were pretty powerful, so I didn't get a lot of sweet potato flavor as I was eating. The bison was delicious, and while I think I'd add less cumin next time - I tend not to like sweet, earthy flavors in my chili - overall, I think this was a success. The prep time did take a little longer than I wanted it to (I had a really bad reaction to the onion as I was chopping it!), but as long as you count on that and slot out enough time for the stew to cook completely, this is a very stress free, tasty dinner that's perfect for unseasonably cold weather.

It also reheats well for lunch the next day!

Which, as far as I'm concerned, is always a great bonus.