I've always been a big fan of making basic chili con carne with beans, starting with canned chili beans, then add meat and other stuff to make it actually good!

Being an expat makes that skill a pretty good thing. While there are some decent farang (Thai racial slur for white person) restaurants here that serve up chili, it's expensive and usually not up to my standards.

Now, doing this is near to impossible out in the rural countryside. There just aren't these things in any store—not even the ground beef. You can get beef, but you would have to hand chop it, like making steak tartare. Of course, you could make Texas chili and have cubed beef—just braise it long time. In Bangkok or a few other metro areas, a cinch. Otherwise, you can order everything but the ground beef online (I use Lazada).

Rawai Beach, southern Phuket, makes everything available, generally. While I would prefer to start with either Dennison's or Stagg, all they have is Bush's. I loathe their baked beans—which should be called candied beans—but we'll see.

Recipe