Vegetarian Chili

I only know how to cook a few things, but this chili is pretty good.

After a couple of years of experimentation, I’ve landed on a chili recipe that I like a good bit. Everybody else who’s had it is either loves it or is surprisingly good at acting like they do.

It’s so simple that it barely even qualifies as a recipe, but I’m sharing it because the effort-to-taste ratio is unbeatable. The hardest part is opening cans and dicing a few vegetables.

Plus, decades of television taught me that homemade chili is for obsessive suburban dad types who spend hours over it and fiercely guard their recipe. I was surprised that even I could get good results without all the fuss, so it might encourage other lazy cooks out there to give it a try. Take this basic recipe and modify it to build your own.

Ingredients

  • 2 12-ounce cans of black beans, drained and rinsed
  • 2 12-ounce cans of red kidney beans, drained and rinsed
  • 1 12-ounce can of corn, drained (I’ve used the “Mexicorn” or similar variant with peppers included, but I don’t think it’s worth the extra cost)
  • 1 medium-sized yellow onion, diced
  • 1 green bell pepper, diced
  • 1 red or orange bell pepper, diced
  • 4 jalapeños (or 2 Anaheim peppers), diced and with ribs and seeds removed
  • 2 12-ounce cans of diced tomatoes (“fire roasted” works best, and I prefer the Muir Glen brand even if it’s just the extra cost convincing me it tastes better)
  • 1 6-ounce can of tomato paste
  • 4 tablespoons chili powder
  • ~2 teaspoons cumin (generally, the more the better)
  • 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
  • ~1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
  • ~2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
  • ~1/2 teaspoon salt (or 1 tsp soy sauce)

Directions

With a slow cooker, I’ve dumped everything into the pot before going to work, set it on “low,” and had it for dinner that evening, i.e. about 6-8 hours.

With a dutch oven:

  1. Saute the onion in olive oil over medium heat until translucent
  2. Add the cumin, let it “toast” for about 30 seconds before stirring everything together
  3. Add the tomatoes and mix everything to de-glaze the bottom of the pot
  4. Add the beans, corn, and peppers, mixing after each step
  5. Add the spices and tomato paste, then mix again until the tomato paste is fully integrated
  6. Heat over medium, stirring every few minutes, until the chili is bubbling
  7. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for at least an hour, mixing periodically to keep the tomatoes from burning

Or the short version: dump everything into a pot and cook it all day, but start with the onions.

Peaches & Nougat

Recommending Adam Ragusea’s YouTube channel, which I’m only now discovering for some reason.

It seems a little absurd to be promoting a YouTube channel with over one million followers, on a blog that gets 30 views on a high-traffic day. But if I’m only just now discovering Adam Ragusea’s channel, with its being perfectly suited to so many of my interests, then I figure it’s likely other people haven’t, either.

Ragusea is a former journalism professor with infuriatingly good hair, who lives in Macon, Georgia and makes videos about recipes, food science, and food history. Every one of these could’ve made me a subscriber, but The Algorithm didn’t deem his channel relevant until it offered a video asking Is Washing Rice Really Still Necessary? (His finding: frequently not).

But the rest of the videos get gradually more interesting, at least to me as a hapless cook who loves collecting not-entirely-useful information. What’s the real reason billions of people refuse to eat pork? (It’s probably not trichinosis). Why do some people think Hershey chocolate tastes like vomit? (Soured milk). WTF Is Nougat? (Whipped sugar, but it’s surprisingly more complicated).

The one that really got me hooked was about Georgia’s association with peaches. I’ve known since I was a teenager that calling it the Peach State didn’t make sense, since pecans and peanuts (among others) were always bigger crops. This video explains — using The Georgia Peach by William Thomas Okie as a primary reference — that it was essentially a post-Civil War branding campaign. (It also explains why I never saw many peaches on the drive down to Florida; they need cooler weather, which is why they’re mostly grown closer to South Carolina).

I haven’t tried any of his recipe videos yet, but the one for easy Chana masala seems like a no-brainer for someone like me, who’s intimidated by the complexity of Indian food. Edited: I’ve tried the easy version of the recipe. It’s… fine. Nothing special, but considering how stupid easy it is to make, it’s fine.

I’ve long been interested in stuff like SciShow, Mental Floss, and The Straight Dope, which have all tried (to one degree or another) to make factual information entertaining. Now more than ever, it’s reassuring and even calming to watch something that acknowledges it can be fun to learn things. Ragusea’s opinionated, but pragmatic and non-prescriptive above all else, so I can’t imagine him ever making a proclamation like “no unitaskers in the kitchen.” Until that happens, I’m getting a kick out of nerding out about food.