Chilli con carne with boiled rice

Chilli con carne and boiled rice

For dinner last night we had the chilli con carne, served with boiled rice. Since the kids were having it, I did reduce the amount of red chilli quite a bit, only using 1 long red chilli, with the seeds and membranes scraped out. I also didn't add any chilli powder. When i was gathering all the spices out of the pantry, I also realised that I didn't have any coriander left, so I ended up using garam marsala instead, which has a few extra spices, including cinnamon, so I left out the cinnamon stick from the recipe too.

This was actually the first time I had ever minced meat using the thermomix! It worked out quite well. The recipes instructs you to use partially frozen cubed beef. I put it in the freezer for about 30 minutes before I started cooking, and it was perfect. After mincing it with the turbo function, the meat pieces were just a bit bigger that regular minced meat. At the end of cooking it was just the right texture, and very similar to the picture in the recipe book. If you have ever tried cooking actual mince in the thermomix, you would know it is quite easily turned into a puree, so this is definitely the way I will go from now on.

Once I had made the chilli con carne, I put it into the thermoserver while I prepared the rice. I have a confession to make...Since getting my thermomix 7 months ago, I have only done rice in it once. It was a disaster! I am not entirely sure what I did wrong but the middle of the simmering basket didn't seem to get cooked, so there was a big chunk of uncooked rice sitting there. So ever since that incident I have been cooking rice in my decor microwave rice cooker! So last night, I decided to give it another go!

There are a couple of recipes for rice on the chip - the automated one, which for some reason takes 28 minutes, and the recipe from the book, which takes only 20 for long grain rice. I usually only have basmati and arborio rice in the house, so I used basmati. I did read before I started the recipe that basmati only needs 15 minutes cooking time, but when I started the cooking I forgot to alter the time. The rice ended up a little bit overcooked, so I will remember that for next time! Aside from that, there wasn't any uncooked rice in the middle this time!

Boiled rice

I think the important things to remember are to rinse your rice well, and make sure there is enough water to reach right up into the centre of the bowl once the blades are spinning at speed 4. I did reduce the amount of rice down as we usually only need 3/4 cup of uncooked rice for the 4 of us.

Overall this was a very tasty dish, and I will definitely do it again. It made quite a lot though, so I have put half of it in the freezer for one of those nights I don't feel like cooking!

Happy thermomixing!