Buffalo Chicken and White Bean Chili

The boyfolk and menfolk in my family are nuts about chicken wings….and I love them, too, though I have a harder time justifying an order of them along with a pizza than they do.  I’ll eat them, mind you, but I envy their laissez faire attitude leading to huge piles of bones on their plates. However, the original buffalo wing was apparently invented at a pizzeria, so the connection is an authentic one.

And it’s Frank’s Red Hot Sauce that makes a buffalo wing a buffalo wing, in many people’s opinion (including mine).  The sauce has that perfect balance of cayenne peppers and vinegar, just the smell alone makes your mouth water.  You can of course play around and use other hot sauces to make your wings….but you’ll never go wrong with Frank’s Red Hot (this is not a sponsored post, by the way!).

Not at all hard to justify is a bowl chicken and bean chili.  I came up with this Buffalo Chicken Chili recipe because I was tired of shoving around the Frank’s Red Hot sauce in the fridge, and it was cold and I thought – chili!  This recipe is quite ridiculously easy, and because the chicken cooks fast and because the hot sauce does a lot of the heavy lifting flavor-wise it takes very little time to cook, unlike many chilis which need to be simmered for quite a while.  Make this a couple of days before you are going to serve it, if possible, so they flavors have time to blend.

I also made this for a crowd (tripled the recipe) with ground chicken, as I didn’t have the patience to dice so much chicken.  I used a mix of light and dark ground chicken, which is more juicy and flavorful than just white meat ground chicken.  I also added it in after the vegetables were sautéed, and cooked and stirred until pretty much all of the pink was gone before adding my broth and hot sauce.  This seemed like the thing to do to let them eat get nicely and crumbly in the chili.