As I've mentioned before, every third Monday, gaming night is at my place and I need a vast quantity of food. Which usually means a big pot of something. I have a handful of dishes that usually work well, but sometimes I want to try something different. And I've been informed that I will be making this again, so I should probably start codifying it.

The inspiration for this dish is the barbacoa burrito at Chipotle. It's beef stewed for a long time, which I usually get with the tomatillo-green chile salsa. So I thought I'd try making a tomatillo and green chile, um, chili. I'm going to be well sick of typing those two words by the time this is done.

Starting with the beef - two and a half pounds of chuck roast cut into stew-size pieces, i.e. about half the size of what they cut "beef for stew" into at the grocery store. I'd bought a giant chuck roast three weeks back for a Monday gaming beef stew, and this was the rest of it. Built a rub for the beef out of a tablespoon of cumin, a tablespoon of kosher salt, a tablespoon of smoked paprika, a half teaspoon of black pepper, and a teaspoon of oregano. Tossed the beef in this and let it sit -- for a couple of hours, but that's only because I was actually prepping this Sunday night and was making that night's dinner as well.

For the chili liquid, I headed for the food processor. Starting with about... ten tomatillos. Basically, all of the good ones from the basket at the St. Louis Park Rainbow. If you went to the SLP Rainbow on Sunday afternoon looking for tomatillos and found only three or four shitty small ones in the bottom of the basket, feel free to curse my name to the sky. Anyway, I blanched these, husk-on, for three minutes. Then I let them cool, cut out the cores, and popped 'em in the KitchenAid.

Joining them were: two onions, chunked. An entire head's worth of garlic cloves. Two poblanos and six Anaheims, seeded and very well deribbed. In the future I may leave one or two of the chiles with a bit more of their heat, because the final dish h ad no heat at all, and it perhaps could have used a little. This was completely and thoroughly pureed.

From there on it was fairly standard stew stuff. Browned off the meat in batches. Poured the puree in with the beef and a cup of water. Let that simmer for I don't even know how long. A couple of hours at least on Sunday night before it went in the fridge for the next day.

All I did the next day was heat up the beef-chile mixture, add a 36 ounce can of drained and rinsed hominy, two standard cans of drained and rinsed black beans, and let the whole pot simmer for another hour or so just to reduce it a bit, as the puree had dissolved into almost pure liquid by that point.

There were no leftovers.

I have two plans for the future of this dish - the first is to up the heat level slightly by leaving in some of the chile's natural heat. And the second is to reserve some of the puree - maybe half a cup, tops - and reintroduce it to the long-cooked chili right before serving, just to add back some of the fresh elements and tomatillo tartness. Although you'd be amazed how fresh and relatively light this thing tastes even after 3-4 hours on the stove.