Feed the Streets: Chili Recipe

If you're ever looking to feed a large amount of people with a small amount of time, chili is usually the go to dish. There are a lot of different chili recipes out there that vary in boldness, taste, spice and flavour - so you can adjust the recipe according to who you're feeding. In this case, I participated in an outreach event to feed the homeless of Toronto, so spice was out of the question since I didn't expect the homeless to care much for spice.

I found a really simple chili recipe online that required no vegetables - gasp! - which in the long run saved us a lot of time since chopping up the vegetables would have made the recipe twice as long to prepare. We bought most of the ingredients in cans, so all we had to do was open it up and dump it in the pot, the only thing we had to do was cut the onions (thankfully we had a recruit of manly mans who volunteered to shed the tears).

Here's the recipe:

1 pound ground beef

1 onion

1 can stewed tomatoes

1 can tomato sauce

1 can kidney beans

2 cans mushroom

Chili powder

Garlic powder

Salt and Pepper to taste

Water as needed

Directions:

1) Saute beef and onions in a pan

2) Dump everything in a pot, add spices to taste. Bring to a boil then let simmer.

Overall preparation and cooking time:

1 hour

Multiply the recipe as needed, depending on how many people you're planning to feed. In our case, we multiplied it by 4.

There's really not much to this recipe, but I just wanted to blog about this so I could share some thoughts to those who may be thinking of doing something similar. I hesitated for a long time in making this event because there seemed to be a lot of cautionary preparations that needed to be done, and if there are other people who are hesitating as well, here are some of what we did that might help you out:

1) You can get styrofoam containers from random chinese restaurants. We had to ask around in a couple of places, but eventually we found some that were willing to sell us containers with lids. This time around, we managed to get $0.20 per container at Lucky Moose in downtown Toronto.

2) Don't stack the containers on top of each other! Especially if the chili is hot because it will break. Place a cardboard box between each layer of chili.

3) Since it was winter when we did this, the chili will get cold if you don't use heat insulating bags.

4) We also added a dinner roll with the chili. Some people will ask for water though, so it would be a good idea to give water as well.

So that's it, a simple ingredient that brought a smile to those who needed one :)