Recipe - Southwest Skillet Chili Mac - Picture Tuturiol

I was checking out Pinterest the other night and saw THIS recipe on there. It looked so good, and I was ready for some comfort food, so decided to give it a try. The fact that I had all the ingredients in the pantry also helped me decide to make it. :)

Here's what you'll need

Heat about 2 tbs of Olive Oil in a cast iron skillet (my ONLY choice for skillets!) While that is heating up, chop your onion.

Once your Olive Oil is hot, add those lovely onions to the skillet and cook until soft. This doesn't take long so watch them!

Once the onions are soft and translusent, add your garlic. The recipe calls for 3 cloves, but I buy my garlic in the jar, ready to go, so I added about 3/4 of a teaspoon to the onions.

Let that cook for a few minutes, just to release the flavor of the garlic into the onions.

Then add your ground beef to the onion and garlic mixture.

Start mixing it around and breaking it up so the ground beef will be in smaller bites or crumbles.

You want to cook the hamburger until it's thoroughly cooked.

Now here's where I realized my skillet was too small for everything I was going to add in, so I got out this baby. This is my huge iron skillet that I use for large batches of sausage gravy and during the holidays.

So I transfered my onion, garlic and ground beef mixture to this puppy and then added my chili powder and mixed that in good.

To this mixture, I added a can of diced tomatoes and a can of tomato paste.

Then I added 1 and 1/2 cup of water. Now I actually added about 1/2 cup of water more later as I felt it needed it.

Then I added 1 and 1/2 cup of elbow macaroni. Here's the one cup - I didn't bother to take a picture of the 1/2 cup. lol

I also added my can of beans at this time. The recipe called for black beans, but I didn't have those so I used a can of chili beans. Here it is all mixed up.

Then you add your corn. The recipe called for canned corn, but I only have frozen veggies so I used frozen corn.

Mix it up and cover it and cook for about 15 minutes or until the pasta is soft, but not too soft!

While this is cooking, shred your cheese. Then when your pasta is done, add half the cheese to the mixture and stir until melted.

Put the other half on the top and then pop under the broiler until the cheese is bubbly and slightly browned.

Get a plate and dish some up and enjoy!

Now, the recipe calls for more spices than I added - Cumin and Cayenne Pepper. I had a bad episode with Cumin once, so I'm always leery of using it, even though I do love it. I definitely think it needed more spices, so I recommend you stick with the recipe and not me. I'm also thinking I would either cut down on the tomato paste or maybe even use ketchup instead. Not sure. I love to tweak recipes until I get them the way I want them. In any case, it was a fun and delicious recipe!

Blessings - Julie