20 September, 2021

Vegetarian Chili

Comments : 1 Posted in : Cooking, Soup on September 20, 2021 by : Sheila Tags: bell peppers, black beans, carrot, celery, chili, chilis, corn, kidney beans, onion, tomatoes

Fall, despite what the calendar says, has fallen in Calgary. Warm days (mostly) and cool nights. The leaves are falling – we really only have three colours here – green, yellow then brown. We only rarely have other leaf colours – the occasional purple, and the very, very occasional red. And that’s pretty much all we get. I envy Eastern Canada all the vivid colours of their maple leaves….not enough to risk sitting out winter in 15 foot snowbanks, though. 🙂

Since I discovered homemade soups and stews, I try to have them a couple times a week. They’re generally inexpensive, and often they are just full of vegetables – can’t go wrong with that.

I decided to make a chili with no meat – the mancub was dubious but willing, I’ll take what I can get, approval-wise.

Ingredients:

• 1 28oz can of tomatoes – I used chopped but crushed would have worked better – I also used the can to add an equal measure of vegetable broth
• 3 long bell peppers – 2 regular peppers would be just fine
• 1 carrot
• 1 onion
• 4 cloves of garlic
• 1 to 1-1/2 cups of corn, drained
• 1 can of kidney beans, drained
• 1 can of black beans, drained
• (I used the Instant Pot and cooked 1 cup of dried kidney beans and 1 cup of dried black beans)
• 1 to 2 stalks of celery
• 2 TB of chili powder
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1 small can of green chilis or some jalapeno or poblano or 1 tsp of cayenne

This is so simple – chop everything up and put it all into a soup pot. Put it onto the stove and let it simmer until the onions and carrots are cooked. I was going to put this into the oven and let it simmer in there, but I didn’t plan ahead and sort of ran out of time.

I simmered my chili until it had cooked down to almost no extra liquid – hence why I think crushed tomatoes might work better. This tastes really good as it is, though.

Serve with some sour cream and some grated cheese. I used Parmesan but cheddar or mozzarella would be ooey gooey good.

We were a little naughty and kind of made this into nachos….well, chili over tortilla chips. I was hoping to find some corn chips, but the store I went to had none – peculiar, right?