When I arrived in Chicago in the beginning of May, it was gorgeous, perfect 75 F weather (24 C), the skies were sunny and the grass was green. Two days later, it was cold and miserable. The weather dropped nearly twenty degrees, it was raining all the time, and of course, windy. It was like Chicago was saying, “Welcome home, Leena. If you don’t like the weather, just stick a hot dog in your pie hole and a wait a few minutes. It probably won’t get better, but the urge to hurt small animals will definitely be gone.” Gee, thanks Chicago. Bad weather used to affect my mood, but as a gastronome, I find it easier to just let it affect my hunger. No matter how clear skies are or how iced down the streets are with snow, pretty much every major shift in weather affects my hunger in a different way. A hot and muggy summer’s day calls for a Flavor Ice, preferably lime. And randomly cold weather in the middle of May in Chicago after returning from South Australia, the land with ginger beer and no snow, makes me crave something that is hearty, warm, and will soothe my sobs as I mourn my big move. Yup, using food for comfort never felt so psychologically right. I needed chili. And lots of it. So I enlisted the help of my father and brother to make a few chilis and drink a few beers. My dad made his famous french bread, which isn’t really his french bread at all, but a package of premade french bread dough that he buys at the store. What makes it my dad’s is the method he uses to bake the bread. My father is also a scientist, and a long time ago (probably back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, you know, the 80s), he was able to get these long, heat proof glass tubes from the lab. By setting the frozen dough into the greased tubes overnight, the dough can rise and keep it’s shape while it defrosts.
Then the entire tube goes into the oven in the morning, and we have fresh baked French bread with our chili.
The outside is slightly crunchy (although the bits that bake in the tube stays a bit softer) and the bread has a super buttery taste from the butter the tube was greased with.
It is soft and fluffy, but I am not quite certain what the tube does that baking the bread by itself would not. I have yet to experiment using this method with my own homemade bread doughs, but it could be a fun experiment to try in the future. There were three different kinds of chili, my spicy-sweet beef chili with chipotles, Dilip’s used to be turkey but now is beef chili (whose ingredients are unknown to me–I swear, he loves not telling me!), and my dad’s vegetarian chili that probably had every chili powder and pepper in the house thrown into it, along with some molten hot special chile powder he probably smuggled back from India. My dad’s chili has been known to make grown men cry. I’m so proud of him.
Home, at least for me, is certainly where the chili is. ~LTG!
