Chili Gravy

I've thought about starting a food blog for years. Every year the urge gets strongest at Thanksgiving. I spend a month planning a menu that makes me happy, but provides for all the vegetarians/vegans/teetotalers/onion haters etc at the table. But I never got around to starting the blog until now. And chili gravy is what finally drove me to get started.

My husband found the recipe. He wanted me to make cheese enchiladas, and he started surfing Tex-Mex food sites. He is from California, I am from Oregon, and we both grew up on tomato-based enchilada sauces. But the Tex-Mex way involves chili gravy, and it is so much better. It's a standard flour gravy, similar to what you make for Thanksgiving turkey. You just add cumin, chili powder, and a few other Mexican seasonings, and suddenly you have a miracle. A cross between an American gravy and a Mexican mole. Except that it's a lot less work than a real mole, but more versatile.

I don't understand why this sauce has stayed limited to Tex-Mex cuisine. We ate it on boiled potatoes and roast beef last night. It was amazing. Then cheese enchiladas. I'm planning the weekly Sunday breakfast around it now. I'm thinking beef hash with fried eggs, and chili gravy over the whole thing. I want to try chili-gravy poutine. I will pour chili gravy on mashed potatoes. I expect that the first year of this blog will have a lot of chili gravy posts.

For this week's batch of gravy, I made the recipe here, http://homesicktexan.blogspot.com/2007/01/essence-of-tex-mex.html. I used Swanson's beef broth (the reduced sodium one). It was pretty great. I did boost the beef flavor with some powdered porcini mushrooms and pan juices from a chuck roast. I'm looking forward to trying versions with homemade stock. Or with roasted ancho chilis. Or ....