Chicken Chili a la Willy

Once I got over the sting from the poms, I turned to the important task of making dinner.  I had a bunch of odds & ends laying around that were just asking to be thrown into the Crockpot - a few orange & yellow carrots, some celery that had lost most of its crunch, and some chicken that had been hanging out in the freezer since it didn't make the cut into last week's pot pie.  Here's the whole cast, more or less: 

Everything pictured ended up in the crock except about a quarter of the onion, one of the jalepenos, and most of the jar of white beans.  I was really excited to do something with the white beans because we've had quite the history together.  I remember buying it while I was living in Chicago because I wanted to try to recreate a cassoulet-like dish I had on one of my last days in Barcelona.  Two or so years and a move to Minnesota later, the white beans and I were still together.  Whenever I thought about cooking with them I would get grossed out by the gelatinous non-bean content of the jar, and I would put them back on the shelf.  For some reason I could never pitch them or donate them to a food drive.  Until yesterday.  I was pretty excited to not have to look at them anymore, but when it came time to dumping them in the crock they were extremely reluctant to leave the jar.  My attachment to the jar of beans was easily  trumped by their attachment to that jar.  The bottom line is the majority of the jar did not make it into the chili.  And the not-yet-empty jar is still residing in my sink.  

Moving on, I would like to give a shout out to my helpers in the kitchen...

The free Yum coffee and the homemade chocolate chip cookies courtesy of my immigration professor really made the experience enjoyable.  Thanks, guys.  

Now onto the cooking...  I started by chopping up all the veggies.

Then I started to think about how I should be studying for finals.  I glanced at my immigration book...

And quickly turned away and continued cooking.  Everybody has to eat, right?

Once the veggies were all chopped I threw a little oil in the skillet.

Dumped in the onion, pepper, chili powder, cumin, and another kind of chili powder that I had just bought. 

I let the onions get translucent.

And I flipped one of the pieces of onion out of the pan to feed the mouse that lives in the stove.  

Just kidding.  There's no mouse in my stove.  But at lunch we were discussing mouse problems (ahem, Matt & Sam), and Hanna mentioned knowing someone who had a mouse that lived in the stove and would periodically crawl out through the burner.  So I thought I would be nice and consider the needs of mice, should one live in my stove.  

After feeding the imaginary mouse, I dumped the onions into the Crockpot.

Then a big can of diced tomatoes.

Then some beans.

Some chicken (which was still mostly frozen)

The carrots, celery, and more beans.

More chili powder.  I'm not too into measuring things out in cooking.  I go more for what looks acceptable and what smells good.  

I added a little water because I thought I needed some more liquid in there.  Sometimes I use broth, but I only had a giant thing of it that I didn't really want open at the time.  So I stuck with water.  And got this cool picture:

And this one:

Then I gave it a stir, threw on the lid, and turned the dial to "high."

I spent the next 4 hours or so studying constitutional law.

Until the chili looked like this:

We threw on some cheese & some of the remaining onion and had a feast.  

And don't forget the pb sandwich!