Pumpkin Chili; Cook Once, Eat Twice

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November 12, 2021

Pumpkin Chili: Freezer Meal

It’s chili season (and unfortunately already chilly season)! This chili recipe has a bit of surprise ingredient (if you didn’t read the title) - pumpkin! I have had chunks of squash or sweet potato in chili before and I really liked it but this is a little different because it uses a can of pumpkin puree and when I made it the first time I actually used a large can of pumpkin so I wasn’t really sure what it was going to be like. Please note that I am NOT a pumpkin spice kind of girl and I own zero pumpkin candles so I was admittedly nervous.

I was so unsure how this would go over that I just told my family we were having “Chili”, I left the pumpkin part off. They even specifically asked me if there was anything weird about it. “Pssssh. What?! No. I don’t even know why you’d ask that?! It’s just chili.”

Them: “Yeah, but is it like regular chili or is it like Stephanie’s chili?”

Me: “I don’t even know what that means. I’m not dignifying that with an answer.”

Them: “You know, how you add all kinds of stuff like corn?”

Me: “Okay, so sometimes I’m trying to just get rid of some stuff, big deal, a little corn is good in chili. What even is “regular chili”?”

Them: ……

To myself: quick, bring up noodles before they can ask any more questions!

Me: “At least there are NO noodles. Especially not spaghetti noodles!”

Them: “OMG, why do people add spaghetti noodles?! That’s not even chili anymore it’s like a weird spaghetti.”

They then forget what we were even talking about and go back to making laundry and destroying the house.

The ol’ spaghetti-noodles distraction.

I then proceeded to do a really good job of not saying the word “pumpkin” and hiding all the evidence.

Yep, right up until it was literally time to serve it and I accidentally said “Okay! Ready to try the Pumpkin Chili?!” to the only child that was downstairs at the time (because I was legit excited about trying this).

And then a miracle happened.

Miraculously, the younger child, who normally cannot hear me when she’s upstairs, heard the word pumpkin and came running downstairs…..

The Younger Child: “THERE’S PUMPKIN IN IT!? We knew you were doing something weird. No thank you.”

The Older Child: “Yeah, no thanks. I’ll find something else.”

Me: Sigh….so close.

and so then just Andy and I ate the [Pumpkin] Chili.

Their loss! I thought it was delicious. I added a little sour cream and cheese to take it over the top. I wasn’t sure if those additions would enhance or detract since there’s cinnamon and pumpkin but it definitely enhances.

And, Andy, my meat-and-potatoes-guy, finished his bowl and had one the next day so that means it’s not too weird. :)

I also did keep the pumpkin a total secret from him until after his first bowl and he never said anything tasted weird or anything. I mean, he was wondering why I kept looking at him expectantly while I waited for him to ask me questions about it or ask for something else but his mind went in a totally different direction not at all related to food, or this blog post really. I mean, they do say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach but…..hey, isn’t it weird that people add noodles to their chili? I mean macaroni noodles maybe but spaghetti noodles?!?

Anyway, definitely was not like a “Pumpkin Spice” Chili. Really just like a good bean-less chili.

Plus, the cinnamon helps to warm you up from the inside too! Ahhh, that’s what you’re feeling inside Andy!

The good news is that no sugar is (directly) added, all the sweetness that offsets the spiciness, comes from the pumpkin and peppers.

Note, too, that there aren’t any beans so this chili can check off the boxes of most diets. Of course, if you’re a bean lover, some small butter beans would be really good in this….and then you are also not feeling cinnamon or “love” deep down but probably something else entirely.

hahaha….I crack myself up sometimes.

When I posted my test batches on facebook it was suggested to try adding some orange zest to brighten this, or any, chili up a little so if any of you try that let me know how it turns out! And as always, share your pictures with our facebook group!

Any other tips can be posted there or left here including if this chili made your marriage a little stronger or the age of your can of pumpkin or what kind of banter you have with your family re: your cooking skills.

Enjoy and stay warm - inside & out. ;)

Ingredients

2 pounds Together Farm’s ground beef

2 medium or about 2 cups onions, chopped

2 medium or about 2 cups red bell peppers, chopped

1 large can (28 oz) diced tomatoes, or 6 fresh tomatoes, chopped (if using canned, use the fire-roasted for more depth of flavor)

1 small can (15 oz) tomato sauce

1.5 cups pumpkin puree (if you’re nervous use a small can, I used a big one and it was not overwhelming…it was also super expired but it still smelled good and tasted good! I bet I’m not the only one with a very expired can of pumpkin in my pantry so hopefully that helps someone.)

2 tsps chili powder (more to taste)

2 tsps cumin

2 tsps cinnamon

few drops hot sauce

1 tsp unrefined sea salt

1 tsp black pepper

1 cup water (or broth)

Gallon bags and a sharpie if you’re making one to freeze for later (or as a gift!)

To make now on the stove:

Fry the ground beef and onions in the bottom of a dutch oven or heavy bottom pot. You could add some garlic during the last minute or two of frying if you’re a garlic lover but I bet you were already going to do that without my prompting.

I do not drain off the “grease” (sounds like such a dirty word), this is tallow or fat from our 100% grassfed beef animals - this is where all the extra super good stuff gets concentrated, of all the things to throw out this is NOT it - you should throw out the meat before you throw out this liquid gold. Of course, if you’re using meat that you bought from a middle man that has not verified with their own eyes the farm (not factory) that raised the beef (which would include all the grocery stores, yes, even Aldi), then the fat is surely concentrating vile things that should immediately be strained off and thrown out….this includes meat labeled as grassfed because labels are lies. Remember that and you’ll be fine. Then, if the beef is from a beautiful, small family farm not doing 100% grassfed (sigh) then I would still not save the fat - your omega’s are all screwed up and you’ll end up with an unhappy body. That’s the hardest step - but since you’re here, it’s now your easiest step! [shameless plug: you just click that link above, order with a few clicks and then sit and wait for grassfed beef containing liquid gold to show up in a few days right on your doorstep!]

Add everything else. Bring to a simmer. Cover and simmer on Low for an hour or until you can’t wait any longer. The goal is to meld flavors and soften the other veggies.

Serve topped cheese and sour cream.

To make now in a slow cooker (IP’ers you can probably figure it out):

Fry the ground beef just enough to get it broken into small pieces - you can add the onion if you prefer. See note in the “To make now on the stove:” instructions for the proper handling any “grease”. Then add everything to the slow cooker. Cover and cook on Low for 6-8 or High 3-4 hours or until the meat is cooked through and the peppers are soft.

Tip: plug your cord into a timer if your slow cooker does not automatically shut off.

To make one to freeze for later:

Label a gallon-sized freezer bag with the recipe name, best by date (3-6 months of assembling) and cooking instructions.

Fry the ground beef just enough to get it broken into small pieces - you can add the onion if you prefer. Let cool. See note in the “To make now on the stove:” instructions for the proper handling any “grease”.

Add the par-cooked ground beef to the bag along with all of the remaining ingredients. Note that the water can be added on the day you cook the meal - just be sure to write that on the bag.

To cook: Thaw* contents of bag overnight. Dump thawed* ingredients into the slow cooker and add 1 cup of water or broth. Cover and cook on Low for 6-8 or High 3-4 hours or until the meat is cooked through and the peppers are soft.

Pro Tip: If you make a meal that can also be a freezer meal, always make two at once: one for now and one that you freeze for later. You will save so much time on prep and dishwashing alone that it is ALWAYS worth the tiny bit of extra effort. Use all your new free time well: a drink and foot soak.

*If the government asks I told you you had to thaw everything in the fridge before cooking it. In my chaotic life I often forget to do this or don’t thaw it long enough so there are still frozen chunks. In fact, I am so inept that I have actually cooked freezer meals from totally rock solid frozen in my slow cooker and lived to tell about it - but maybe my system is used to living on the edge with old pumpkin, dangerous cooking techniques, etc, so I don’t recommend you do it. I’m just letting you know that I did it and I experienced no ill effects. The only thing I noticed is that I did need to stir the meal after it all thawed so it was evenly spread out in my slow cooker and I needed to cook it a little longer. Please refer to the cooking chart you should've received with your first order and use your Together Farms meat thermometer you should’ve gotten with a subsequent order to make sure your meat is to temp and you should live to cook another day!

freezer meal

Recipe

“Why Burger Night?” (A Long Answer for the Curious, the Hungry, and the Miracle-Seekers)

“Why Burger Night?” (A Long Answer for the Curious, the Hungry, and the Miracle-Seekers) If you’ve ever sat on our farm with a burger in one hand and a beer in the other, gazing at the cows on the hill and wondered: “What made them decide to do this?" well, friend, settle in. The short answer is: we wanted to bring people to the farm and pizza was already taken. But the long answer? The long answer involves 60 acres of overgrown dreams, a barn on the brink of collapse, a freezer full of lard and the sort of miracles you only recognize in hindsight. It All Started With a (Totally Normal) Idea… Back in 2009, when we bought this place, we had no intention of selling meat, inviting strangers over or running a seasonal restaurant. Heck, we didn’t even have farming experience. The idea was simple: raise our kids in the country, grow some of our own food, and enjoy a little space. That’s it. We bought the property when Mady was three and Adeyle was six months old. If you had told me then that someday we’d be hosting live music, running a bar and serving 300+ burgers on a Saturday night… I’d have assumed you were drunk. And then I’d have laughed until I couldn’t breathe and pointed out that neither Andy nor I had ever farmed a day in our lives and we knew even less about running a restaurant. But life’s funny like that. The Dilapidated Farm This farm hadn’t been used for animals in ages. It was more of a rural junkyard with a leaky house, decaying buildings and enough broken stuff to fill a dozen dumpsters. It took us a full year just to clean things up and find our starting point. But then came the animals. We started with a couple pigs and cows for ourselves. Then came chickens. A few geese. Some ducks. A pair of goats that may or may not have been invited. A sheep. A milk cow. Turkeys. More pigs. (You get the idea.) And then we reasoned amongst ourselves: “Well, if we’re already feeding a couple pigs, what’s a couple more? We can sell the extras and get our own meat for free!” HAHAHAHAHAHA. That was cute. Because spoiler alert: there's no such thing as "free" meat when you have now created an entirely new division called SALES. (And, pro tip: marketing and sales is way harder than production. By a lot. Sigh, what young, naive fools we were.) But we had convinced ourselves it was a great idea (another pro-tip: always run your ideas past people smarter than you and with no skin in the game). So we expanded. More pigs. More cows. And just when we were starting to feel like maybe we were getting the hang of it, corn prices shot through the roof and feeder pigs became impossible to find. Which meant: time to make our own piglets. But you can’t just have one sow. The efficient number is closer to six. So… guess who’s now drowning in pork? You're a good guesser! It was us. The Farmer's Market Fizzle At this point we needed storage, so we added a walk-in freezer. Then we needed to sell all that meat, so we hit up every farmer’s market we could get into.Which was exhausting (remember, we both had day jobs during all of this too). And limited. And frustratingly political. (If you think farmer’s markets are all kumbaya and holding hands, think again.) This meant we couldn’t get into the big downtown market or winter market, so we did 3-5 small ones every week, and we couldn’t go to the nearby Twin Cities markets because our beloved butcher is only WI-inspected and using them is a non-negotiable (truly uncured meats (no celery either!) and no weird stuff is nearly impossible to find).We knew farmer’s markets weren’t going to be a long-term plan anyway. I had quite the knack for bringing the exact wrong products on any given day and hated how weather-dependent they were, not to mention seasonal (This was 10+ years ago before social media was the force it is today and before winter markets were much of an option around here.)So the wheels started turning…What if, instead of us chasing people down in hot parking lots, we could get people to come to us (and yes, this is also when we started the online store)? The Farm as a Destination? Our friends and family had started commenting on how beautiful the farm was. And once we looked up from our grindstones long enough, we saw it too. The view. The peace. The potential.Meanwhile, farm-to-table restaurants started popping up in Eau Claire and we started supplying a few. This gave us hope and contacts. But while other farms were doing pizza nights, I couldn’t make that fit for us.For one, I have a terrible relationship with dough and baking (just ask my mother). And two, we’re not a dairy, wheat, or veggie farm, we’re a meat farm. Pizza just didn’t check enough boxes for the ingredients we had and wanted to keep having.But burgers? Burgers are just as versatile as pizza, the focus is MEAT, specifically BEEF. And, BONUS: they go really well with fries and cheese curds.Which brings us to what I'll lovingly call my "lard problem". A Fat Problem (and a Deep-Fried Solution) We had rendered all this gorgeous lard from our pastured pigs and were using some in soaps and balms (shoutout to Good Fat Skincare, formerly Stephanie’s Super Swine Soap), but it was piling up. And while tallow is currently having quite the moment in the spotlight, lard is still a four-letter word to many people (but pro-tip: it's even better for you in lotions!).So I was venting to a chef friend about my lard conundrum when he casually mentioned, “You know, you could use it in the fryer.” EUREKA. That was it. The vision was born: Burgers and fries. Made with our beef. Fried in our fat. Done. Now we just had to figure out literally everything else. 😂 No Experience? No Problem! (Kinda.) We didn’t have restaurant experience or restaurant-investor money. So we did what we always do: figured it out one painful, hilarious, miracle-at-a-time step after another.We leaned on our restaurant friends to help us figure out menus, sourcing, kitchen layout, vent hoods, fryer safety, grease disposal....the million things you don't even know are a thing until you start planning and talking it through. We also knew we wanted everything made fresh to order, not precooked or being held. (Again, there’s a reason you don’t see many burger farms. It’s a trickier & more expensive setup than pizza....especially when you have no idea what you are doing.) So we did pop-ups to test this little theory of mine that if people would drive out to veggie farms for pizza, maybe they'll drive out to a meat farm for burgers??And lo and behold…during one of those pop-ups, who should show up but PBS’s Wisconsin Foodie, a show that had rarely (never?) come this far west and didn’t waste airtime on dumb ideas. They liked what they saw. The wind was now in our sails. Lightning Strikes (Literally) So we got to work. We worked with our health inspector to find the best way to use our existing farm spaces safely. Since banks are pretty well-known for not funding build-it-and-they-will come types of operations we had to get creative with funding and are grateful to have received a loan through our county’s Revolving Loan Fund (because we were creating jobs) and a USDA grant that helped with marketing and startup costs.But the real turning point? That WI Foodie episode that made us believe it really was a good idea and gave us a platform before we really even opened! How crazy is that?!? I'm not sure we would've been able to financially survive those first few years of start-up expenses without it. And the only reason I even saw the post from WI Foodie looking for new farms?I woke up in the middle of the night to a thunderstorm and started scrolling Facebook.I woke up in the middle of the night to a thunderstorm and started scrolling Facebook. Lightning. Literally. ⚡ Burgers, Fries, and Big Dreams So that’s how Burger Night started: A daunting pile of lard, a string of well-timed miracles and the belief that people might just come to the middle of nowhere for something delicious, meaty and fun.Today, Burger Night is burgers, fries, beer, music, bingo, trivia, community and the most magical little farm in the hills of Mondovi.Has everything gone according to plan? Absolutely not.We thought we’d be building a permanent restaurant building “in a few years”. That was many years ago. Reality (and weather) had other plans. And covid struck when we were just two years old so we had quite a baptism-by-fire for those first couple of years (if you came out during 2020-2021 you should give us another try, pretty sure more than a few wrote us off during those crazy years). But now we have our legs somewhat under us.I also loved the idea of turning the used fryer oil into biodiesel for the tractor to really complete the circle but that hasn't made it to reality yet. But there's a million other ideas cooking.The next BIG goal is to build a new building for farm operations so we can convert the barn into a bar with indoor seating. (We’re just waiting on a cool $200K to fall from the sky. Lightning, take the hint.) From Lard to Legacy So why burgers?Because they made sense for our farm, our products, our weird little challenges, our personalities and our beautiful patch of land. Because we wanted something fun & creative. Because fries and cheese curds. But ultimately, because we wanted to share the farm with you.And somehow it all just came together.

Pumpkin Chili; Cook Once, Eat Twice

Pumpkin Chili: Freezer Meal

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