Quick Chili

Sometimes you just don't feel like doing anything all that fancy for dinner.  You'd be perfectly happy just making a peanut butter sandwich, but you decided that this year you'd try and make something at least once a week and the second weekend in January seems a little early to drop that idea.  So this week, we're going with an old standby: quick chili.  This won't appeal to chili purists, but for people who don't feel like putting more than fifteen minutes into dinner, this is pretty great.

You'll need a pound of ground beef, a can of dark red kidney beans, a jar of pasta sauce, some chili powder, and some red pepper flakes.  You can put whatever else you want in, too, but these are all the ingredients I usually bother with.

All you need for a lazy person's dinner!

First off, brown the ground beef in a large skillet.  You can still have some red left, just get it mostly done.

This'll do.

Now, dump in the beans (don't bother draining them, just dump in the can) and the pasta sauce.  I use an entire 14-oz. jar, but put in more or less to your taste (I remember one time my Grammie complaining to Mom that she always put too much tomato in her chili.  Of course, it was the exact same way Mom always made it and she never seemed to have a problem with it before.  Oh Grammie, I miss your crazy ways.)  Mix them in really well and have the heat around medium.

Finally, mix in some chili powder and red pepper flakes.  I'd start with around 2 Tbsp of chili powder and 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes and go from there.  Once everything is nice and hot and mixed well, you're done!  This is something that also works really well for leftovers and, I think, actually tastes better the next day.

Dinner!  And lunch!  And dinner again!