Classic Slow Cooker Chili

My name is Brenda Novak. I’m thirty-nine years old. I live in Grand Island, Nebraska, which is the kind of place that sounds like a punchline until you’ve actually stood in the middle of it and felt the sky pressing down on you from every direction. I drive a semi for a living — refrigerated freight, regional routes, mostly within a day’s haul of home. I have a husband named Dave who fixes things for a living and does it better than anyone I’ve ever met. I have four kids: Tyler, who is nine and obsessed with the Kansas City Chiefs in a way that concerns me; Josie, who is six and has opinions about everything; Amber, who is twelve and the most self-possessed person in our house, which is saying something; and Justin, who is nine, plays football, and eats like a linebacker twice his size.

Right now, as I’m figuring out how to write this, I’m somewhere between Kearney and Lincoln on I-80. It’s a Tuesday. The sky is the color of old dishwater. The road is flat and straight and goes on forever, which is the Nebraska way — everything here goes on forever, and you either make peace with that or you leave. I made peace with it about twenty years ago. I don’t plan on leaving.

Behind my left shoulder, plugged into the 12-volt outlet on the back wall of my cab, there is a slow cooker. In that slow cooker there is chili. It has been cooking for about four hours. It will be ready in two more. When I pull into the rest stop outside of York, I’m going to park, climb back into the sleeper, and eat a bowl of real food while every other driver in that lot eats a gas station hot dog or a bag of chips that tastes like the cardboard it came in.

This is how I eat on the road. This is how I have eaten on the road for going on fifteen years. And apparently — according to my daughter Josie, who learned about this website from her teacher and has been after me for six months to “write down your recipes, Mom, you’re a good cook” — I should be telling people about it.

So. Here I am. Telling people about it.

I should explain how this started, because it didn’t start with some grand vision about healthy eating on the road or finding yourself through food or whatever. It started with a bacon cheeseburger.

This was 2001. I was twenty-four, I’d been driving long-haul for about three years, and I was eating the way most truckers eat: whatever was available, whatever was fast, whatever I could eat with one hand while I drove. Truck stop food, mostly. Drive-through. Gas station sandwiches wrapped in cellophane. I was putting on weight, I was tired all the time, and I had this constant low-grade heartburn that I’d started thinking of as just a permanent condition of my life, like Nebraska wind or Lutheran church on Sundays.

I stopped at a Pilot outside of Columbus one afternoon and ordered a bacon cheeseburger and a side of fries, and I sat down to eat it, and I thought: my mother makes better food than this. My mother, who works the line at an ammunition factory and comes home on her feet after eight hours and still makes a real dinner every single night. Pork chops. Meatloaf. Chicken fried steak with cream gravy. Nothing fancy. Nothing that requires a culinary degree. Just food that was made with actual effort by an actual person who gave a damn.

I did not finish that burger. I drove to a truck stop supply store in the next town and bought a 12-volt slow cooker. It cost thirty-two dollars and it changed my life, which sounds dramatic but is the honest truth.

My mother — Gayle, sixty-three, Grand Island, still sharp as a tack and still makes the best chocolate sheet cake in the state of Nebraska — taught me to cook the way she taught me everything: by making me stand next to her and watch. She didn’t explain much. She didn’t write things down. She cooked by feel and by habit and by thirty years of feeding a family on a budget that left no room for waste or experiment. Larry — my dad, who drove grain trucks for forty years and who is the reason I ended up behind a wheel in the first place — was gone five days a week. Gayle held down the house. She cooked every night. She made it look effortless, which meant I didn’t appreciate it until I was old enough to understand that nothing effortless is actually effortless.

The first thing I figured out how to make in the slow cooker was chili. Of course it was chili. Chili is Nebraska’s answer to almost everything: it’s cheap, it’s filling, it travels well, it improves the longer it sits, and it requires almost no skill to make correctly. You brown some beef. You open some cans. You add spices. You wait. That’s it. That’s the whole secret.

The trick with truck chili is the prep. I do most of the work at home the night before I leave. I brown the beef, I chop the onion and pepper, I mix my spice blend. It all goes into a zip bag in my mini fridge — which yes, I also have in my cab, because if you’re going to cook on the road, you commit to it. In the morning, before I pull out, I dump everything in the slow cooker with the canned tomatoes and beans, set it on low, and leave. Eight hours later, I have dinner. The cab smells like someone’s kitchen. Other drivers walk past my truck at rest stops and stop to ask what I’m cooking. I tell them. They look at me like I’m an alien life form. I consider this a compliment.

Chili is also the food I think of when I think of my sister Darla.

I don’t talk about Darla much in public, and I’m not going to go deep into it here, not today. What I’ll say is that she’s been gone four years, and the two kids she left behind — Amber and Justin — are mine now, and I would burn the world down for them. Amber has Darla’s eyes. Justin has her stubbornness, which I am choosing to view as a gift rather than a challenge, most days.

What I’ll say about food is this: Darla used to steal cookie dough from the bowl when Mom’s back was turned. She’d get a wooden spoon right across the knuckles for it, and she’d do it again five minutes later, grinning. She had a sweet tooth that was its own personality. But she also loved chili — Mom’s chili, the pot that went on every first cold day of October, the one that meant winter was coming and we’d be eating good for the next five months. We’d come home from school and smell it from the front porch and race each other to the kitchen.

I make that chili now. I make it at home, in a proper pot, on cold Saturdays when the whole family is around. And I make it in my cab, on the road, where nobody sees me eat it, where it’s just me and the flat Nebraska highway and a sky that’s been gray since September. I eat it and think about that front porch and the smell coming through the screen door, and I think about Darla racing me inside, and I think about how food holds things that nothing else can hold.

That’s why I cook on the road. That’s why I cook at home. That’s why I’m writing this down.

This version of the chili is the road version — built for a 12-volt cooker and a mini fridge and a schedule that doesn’t allow for babysitting a stove. But it works just as well in a regular slow cooker at home. I’ve made it both ways three hundred times. It feeds six people with leftovers. The leftovers are better than the original, which is the final thing you need to know about chili.

Chili was the thing that started all of it — my grandmother’s version, the smell through the screen door, the race inside with Darla — so when I needed something to cook in a cab on a gray Nebraska highway, it was never really a question. I wanted the taste of that front porch, and I wanted it to work at 65 miles an hour with nothing but a 12-volt cooker and whatever fit in a mini fridge. Here’s what I landed on.

Prep Time: 20 min | Cook Time: 9 hrs | Total Time: 9 hrs 20 min | Servings: 8

Ingredients

1 tablespoon olive oil or avocado oil
1 medium yellow onion (diced small)
1 medium red bell pepper (diced small)
4 medium garlic cloves (finely chopped)
2 tablespoons chili powder
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1/4 teaspoon smoked paprika (optional, but delicious)
1 pound lean ground beef or ground turkey (see note)
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 (28-ounce) can diced tomatoes (undrained)
1 (16-ounce) can tomato sauce
2 cans (15-ounces each) light or dark kidney beans (rinsed and drained (see note))
Shredded cheddar cheese
Sour cream

Instructions

Sauté the aromatics. In a large, 12-inch nonstick skillet, heat the oil over medium heat and add the onions, bell peppers and garlic. Cook, stirring often, for 2-3 minutes. Add the chili powder, cumin, and smoked paprika and stir to combine. Cook for another minute or so.
Brown the meat. Add the ground beef or turkey, salt and pepper to the skillet and cook, breaking up the meat into small pieces, until the ground beef or turkey is no longer pink, 5-6 minutes. Drain any excess grease.
Load the slow cooker. Scoop the mixture into a round 6-quart (or similar size) slow cooker. Stir in the brown sugar, diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, and beans.
Cook low and slow. Cover and cook 8-9 hours on low or 5-6 hours on high. (The chili will thicken slightly the longer it stands after cooking.) Add additional salt and pepper to taste if needed.
Serve. Serve with shredded cheddar cheese, sour cream and any other chili toppings you like.

Nutrition (per serving)

Classic Slow Cooker Chili — The Taste of That Front Porch at 65 Miles an Hour