Tasty vegetarian slow cooker chili that I made by accident.
I wanted to make a version of a tortilla soup recipe I had read online. In an unusual twist, an incomplete cupboard turned this into a great slow cooker chili.
Since I prefer to use as few canned ingredients as possible, I went with dried beans. Here’s part of the accidental magic. I didn’t have two full cups of kidney beans, so I used 1/2 cup of adzuke beans. Well when you slow cook adzuke beans, they break down a little. What you get is small pieces that are like the little bits of ground beef you’d get in a non-vegetarian chili.
The other part of the “accident” is that I intended this to be a soup. However, when you cook the dried beans, they take up almost all of the water and you wind up with chili. Not complaining! This is a good, spicy, hearty chili. The banana & serrano peppers, along with the cayenne, give it that good, building heat that gets a little sweat going by the end of the bowl but isn’t tongue hot.
Ingredients
7 cups water
4 vegetarian bullion cubes
1 (29 ounce) can crushed tomatoes
1 green bell pepper, chopped
1 large yellow onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 large banana peppers, finely chopped
2 serrano peppers, minced
1 1/2 cups frozen sweet corn
1 1/2 cups dried kidney or pinto beans, rinsed
1/2 cup dried adzuke beans, rinsed
3 tbsp chili powder
1 tsp cayenne
3 tbs olive oil
Instructions
- Boil the water. Add the bullion and stir well until completely dissolved. Pour into the slow cooker.
- Add the rinsed beans.
- As you chop each of the vegetables, place them into the crock pot.
- When all the vegetables are in the pot, add the spices and tomatoes.
- Stir well, set your timer for 4.5 hours and the heat to Low.
