A delicious & hearty chili that is perfect for any vegetarian, or even those who don't mind meat either!
My 2 Cents]
This is my first recipe using dry beans that I had soaked overnight. I talked about dry beans in my ‘Get Healthy in 2014: Kitchen Basics Part 1‘ post and I finally took the plunge and gave it a whirl. Since I hadn’t done it before, I looked to youtube for tutorials and found this one on ‘How To Soak Beans & Save Yourself Some Moolah‘ It was so easy. The thing you have to remember is that even though the beans have been soaked, they still will need an hour or so at a boil on the stovetop in order to become soft. Because of this, instead of cooking my chili on low for the 6-8 hours I ended up cooking my chili on high for 8-9 hours. That’s how long it took the beans to soften. Just keep that in mind, depending on which route you end up going.
[More of My 2 Cents]
Because this is such a hearty stew I didn’t even miss the meat. In fact, it was almost like there was meat in there because of all the beans. This was ultra-healthy because I was able to use my freezer corn from this summer as well as canned tomatoes that I did a couple of years ago. Because the tomatoes were whole, I just tossed them in my Blendtec and pulsed them until they were broken up. I ended up practically making tomato juice, but it worked nonetheless.
Adapted from Picky Eater Blog