Potatoes were boiled, roughed up, cooled, oiled and roasted but I didn't get the browning and crispy I was looking for. Chili I canned when beef was something you could afford. Cheddar and smoked jack.

Make more potatoes than you need. Use them in burritos.

Price per person: $2.54

woh woh, why couldn't you just ask the potatoes nicely? just because you don't see tears from their eyes, doesn't mean they don't have feelings.

why you gotta go rough em up like that?

We had a whole conversation. It started with them saying "Baa-aaa! Hrrmmph! Good evening, madam and gentlemen. I am the main dish of the day. May I interest you in parts of my body?"

Did you know that Milliway's now offers delivery?

I misread this as roasted potatoes and chill and thing it was a lord of the rings meme.

I go though the same step to get a crisp on my potatoes and have gone as far as tossing a tsp of cornstarch with them for a really nice shell. Make sure there is a paste like slurry no matter if it’s the potato starch or other.

I also use kosher style salt or granulated soup mix to get the starch spread out. Granulated onion also works, fried onion gave me disappointment compared to the other methods

Just casually mentioning that you canned your own chili...!

I try to keep a few quarts on hand for quick meals. It takes a bit of work and some initial investment but it's so worth it.

The prices here are from January 2025.

12 quarts of chili. Total cost $50.
Homemade: $50÷384 oz = 0.29¢ per ounce ,
Store bought cheap stuff: 384 oz ÷ 15 oz per can × $2.5 per can = $64
Savings: 28% for making it myself.

I'm particularly impressed with the "canning" part, more so than the "making chili" part. Regular canning is a niche enough skill as it is, and you're over here going beyond that doing low-acid pressure canning!

A less badass person who wanted chili in bulk would've frozen the portions instead.

Stupid sexy beans.

I hate freezing stuff like that. You're almost certainly to have busted jar at some point. You're clogging up freezer space. You're at risk of a power outage or your freezer dying because it's only two years old.

I have four or five pressure canners. I paid retail for the first one and the rest I found at yard sales thrift stores. Cost like $15 to replace all the necessary parts and you have a perfectly functional pressure canner for a 7th the cost of retail. They come in very handy when I do large batches like this chili. I might have two or three running at once. Especially if I end up with a free turkey.

i also read 'and chill' and thougth it was like netflix and chill.

I have a pressure canner, but I've never actually pressure canned with it. I tried using it for regular canning once, but it turns out it's so large that when I fill it with enough water to cover tall jars, my stove struggles to get it boiling. I need to go dig my big propane burner out from wherever I stuck it in the basement and try again...

(BTW, there's also the option of freezing in rectangular silicone molds and then putting the blocks in ziploc or vacuum seal bags. That would alleviate 1/3 of your concerns...)

If you are in fact pressure canning something it only requires two or three quarts of water per the instructions. If you're water bath canning then you have to fill it two to 3 in above the level of the jars and that can require a whole lot of BTUs. But you can't shorten that time with a propane burner. Your canner came with a yellow piece of paper that told you under no circumstances should you expose it to a temperature above 12000 BTUs because it will distort the metal and ruin the pressure canner resulting in a catastrophic failure. Which is about the temperature of the large burner on your stove. A propane burner does a whole lot more BTU and there's no safe way to know when you've hit that limit I recommend starting boiling water early If you're going to do water bath canning.

My stove has four equal-size burners and one oblong burner for a griddle, unfortunately. Admittedly, I didn't try that center burner, mainly because the flames would stick out from under the pot on two sides.

Maybe I should try again with the stove, but doing pressure canning (or maybe water-bath canning in short jelly jars).

You could boil the water in a proper pot with the propane burner and the, safely, transfer the water to your canner on the stove. But probably easier just to start that boil 40 minutes early. Generally when I water bath can I start two pots on the stove. Each half full. This gets them boiling faster. Then I can add my filled jars and top off from the other pot.