The best chilis I have ever made or had have always been made from leftovers. Kinda like how Alton Brown claims the best omelet he ever had started out as a broken hollendaise. I tend to tease about food hot-buttons (Chicago pizza, you mean lasagne made with bread?) but I take none of it seriously.
…except for cheese…
IIRC Stagg was/is a Hormel product at the point I able to get it as well. It was just their higher tier product I gather, more expensive and better quality. Seemingly better quality meat, beans and veg. More varieties available. Less of a 'dog food for people" texture and flavor. I think the cartoned kind I’m thinking of was Longhorn? Which was amazing for a packaged product. The Wolf has a much better flavor and texture than the regular Hormel, but whenever I’ve bought it was sort of in the same “dog food for people” class as the Hormel, just you know tasted better. Gloppy texture, lowest possible quality beef. Good as a topping or ingredient for low rent chili cheese dip, but not great on its own.
But there was at the time (right around 10 years ago) a sudden fad in the food business for pre-packaged chili. There was like 5 or 10 brands of surprisingly high quality stuff, even Campbell’s Chunky was making a bunch of good varieties they don’t seem to do anymore. Bush’s Beans were even pushing chili in glass jars that didn’t suck. I don’t see any of this anymore. Just Hormel, the occasional can of Wolf, the 2 extent (and not very good) Chunky versions. Obviously they still make Stagg (at least by you), but I’ve not seen it in the wild in a good 5 years and have no clue if its the same or as good as I remember it. All of the other options seem to have evaporated, though I’d expect some of them still exist somewhere.
Hey, get back here buddy!!
i only fight over food when said food is in front of me 
And bacon
i had cauliflower carrot soup last night, chicken noodle (with copious caramelized onions), and bacon bean is sound awfully tantalizing
hmm… i just realized all my soups contain alliteration…
Canned or frozen ingredients are a matter of convenience and necessity only. If I’m making chili or something else requiring tomatoes in mid-February, the ‘fresh’ tomatoes are going to be rubbish unless I have access to a greenhouse; hence, canned. Besides, my S.O. burns water; canned soup at least can be microwaved as needed. OTOH, I will be trying out some of the featured recipes!
i use canned *veg all the time, and honestly frozen brussel sprouts are better than fresh. and if you can’t get farm-fresh corn, frozen is the best way to go.
and don’t take me for someone who doesn’t enjoy canned soup, i just usually add a few things 
blanched kale is a welcome addition, as are stewed onions.
internet search doesn’t turn up a single image of these monster carrots the size of baseball bats…anyone?
If you ask me, cilantro ruins anything it touches. But I can’t be judgmental about it. After all, I’m a guy who routinely slathers cold hummus on warm, syrupy waffles and enjoys the hell out of the flavor-wars it causes.
I rather enjoy cilantro, but it’s best used in extreme moderation. My wife absolutely hates it and won’t touch anything with cilantro… however I find it easier to sneak it into foods if i use dried cilantro as it’s less overwhelming. I made some delicious black beans a few weeks back with dried cilantro and maybe 2-3 other spices and my wife loved it, she thought i was joking when i told her i put cilantro in it lol. I’m going to call it a success.
I’ve never heard it explained this way, but I think it’s possible the gene controlling how cilantro tastes is population-based just as lactose tolerance is. In other words, populations with thousands of years of culinary history with a particular ingredient would, by definition, not contain too many people who wouldn’t/couldn’t eat anything with that ingredient, whereas populations who did not encounter the ingredient until modern times would have a higher percentage of people who didn’t like/couldn’t eat it.
Sometimes frozen is better than fresh. Frozen produce is frozen at the peak of its ripeness, not terribly long after being harvested. Unless it’s local and in season, the frozen stuff can taste better. For example, when cooking something with berries, frozen ones are often cheaper and tastier. The biggest problem with frozen is how it changes texture.
I’ve been lurking this thread waiting for that too. I want to see how far I can hit a tennis ball with one.
Got a couple soup recipes worth trying out of it, at least…
Found on the internet
And yeah, I want more details on this supposed variatal. Even looked on the Dept of Agriculture website.
Obviously that’s a forced perspective picture, but you may have noticed already. If not then i’ll direct you to the top of the picture, as you can see the picture taker holding the top of the carrot.
just look at it…
There are several varieties that will grow bigger than what you find in the supermarket aisle if you let them. I mentioned one above. They don’t get that big AFAIK but they don’t need to be that big to be tougher than those supermarket carrots. Also think about the phrasing, the smallest carrot is big enough to be a tree branch, no super-carrots are required, just over-ripe crappy carrots that will actually be improved by the process for being hydrated, cooked to soften & had flavour added by being cooked in the soup.
No one can taste any carrot in canned soup can they? I can’t. It’s decor.
Here, here are some large carrots that may’ve grown in a reasonable amount of time & look pretty damn good.
Here’s bigger if you don’t care about flavour (or form! I’d think the ones above are better for processing but IANAF
Carrots go nuts if you leave them in the ground.
THANKS OBAMA!
