Chipotle Chili Dogs

June. Summer without structure, which for the Holloway household means summer with garden structure, because Jack has imposed an agricultural schedule on the family that is more rigorous than any school calendar. Morning: water. Mid-morning: weed. Afternoon: observe and document. Evening: harvest what's ready. The garden journal is updated daily. The grow charts are maintained. The watermelon is measured weekly. The boy runs a farm in a suburban backyard with the efficiency of someone who has read every agricultural manual and disagreed with half of them.

Noah has retreated into music — summer saxophone, the lazy kind, the kind where he plays on the deck in the evening with no sheet music and no audience and the notes drift across the neighborhood like smoke from a bonfire nobody lit. He plays jazz standards — "Summertime," naturally, because the song wrote itself for this moment, and "Take Five" and "Blue in Green" and things I don't know the names of that sound like what I feel when I stand in the kitchen and listen to my son play music in the dusk. He's fourteen this August. Fourteen and playing Coltrane on a suburban deck during a pandemic. The world is broken and the music is beautiful and both things are true.

Emma discovered cooking. Not my kind of cooking — not Midwestern, not Marlene, not the sturdy casseroles and the practical soups. Emma's cooking is YouTube cooking: Japanese souffle pancakes, Korean fire noodles, something called a "cloud egg" that involves whipping egg whites and baking them like meringue with the yolk in the center. The kitchen after Emma cooks looks like a crime scene committed by someone with excellent taste. She uses every bowl. She uses every whisk. She leaves flour on surfaces I didn't know had surfaces. But the food is good. The food is different. The food is a twelve-year-old discovering that the kitchen is not just her mother's place, it's a place where she can make things she found on a screen and eat them in real life, and the translation from screen to plate is a skill, and she's learning it.

I made pork tenderloin sandwiches on the Fourth of July deck — no family this year, no Grinnell, no Roger and Marlene, just us, five people and the grill and the garden and the fireworks from the neighbors. The tenderloin was breaded and fried and bigger than the bun, because some things don't change for pandemics. Some things are constitutional. Some things are Iowa.

That Fourth of July felt different in the way that year felt different — smaller, quieter, and somehow more itself. No extended family, no road trip to Grinnell, just the five of us and whatever we could pull off the grill while the neighbors set off fireworks we hadn’t bought. I wanted something that felt like a cookout even if it wasn’t the cookout we’d planned, something with smoke and heat and a little bit of attitude — and these chipotle chili dogs are exactly that. They’re the kind of food that doesn’t require an occasion to justify itself, which felt right for a summer when all our occasions had gone sideways.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 25 minutes | Total Time: 35 minutes | Servings: 8

Ingredients

8 beef hot dogs
8 hot dog buns
1 lb ground beef (80/20)
1 small yellow onion, finely diced (plus more for topping)
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, minced
1 tsp adobo sauce (from the can)
1 can (14.5 oz) diced tomatoes, undrained
1 can (15 oz) kidney beans, drained and rinsed
1 1/2 tsp chili powder
1 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp smoked paprika
Salt and black pepper to taste
1 cup shredded sharp cheddar cheese, for topping
Yellow mustard and sour cream, optional for serving

Instructions

Brown the beef. In a medium saucepan over medium-high heat, cook the ground beef, breaking it up with a spoon, until no pink remains, about 6–8 minutes. Drain excess fat.
Build the chili base. Add the diced onion to the pan and cook until softened, about 3 minutes. Stir in the garlic, chipotle peppers, adobo sauce, chili powder, cumin, and smoked paprika. Cook 1 minute until fragrant.
Simmer. Add the diced tomatoes and kidney beans. Stir to combine, reduce heat to medium-low, and simmer uncovered for 12–15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the chili thickens. Season with salt and pepper.
Grill the dogs. While the chili simmers, heat a grill or grill pan to medium-high. Cook the hot dogs, turning occasionally, until lightly charred and heated through, about 5–6 minutes.
Toast the buns. Place buns cut-side down on the grill for 1–2 minutes until lightly toasted.
Assemble. Nestle a hot dog in each bun and spoon the chipotle chili generously over the top. Finish with shredded cheddar, diced raw onion, and mustard or sour cream as desired. Serve immediately.

Nutrition (per serving)

Chipotle Chili Dogs — The Fourth of July We Kept to Ourselves