ReedyBear's Blog

Recipe: Chili from scratch (vegan)

I recently cooked some chili, made from scratch. It came out FANTASTIC, except I could have made it like 3x spicier (it IS spicy, but it doesn't hurt (me) and it should).

You don't get good measurements from me because I cook primarily on intuition. Usually this leads to great results (for my tastes). Sometimes I blunder. It makes my dishes much less repeatable, but MANNN I like the creative part of cooking and measurements just don't give me that.

All the veggies were diced.

Recipe:

Next time, I'd be interested to try using fresh habanero peppers for both flavor and spice (and because they're available at my local grocer and hotter peppers are not). Def would like to pre-cook the carrots a little more. They didn't soften fast enough so I had to cook the whole pot 10 or so minutes longer than I wanted. This was fine, but I think transformed the flavors in a way I wasn't wanting. An earlier taste test was 5-10% better, I thiiiink. I'd still leave the cumin out. Basically I fucking nailed it with this chili other than the spiciness, the garlic amount (flavor was great, but then i tasted it alllll niiiiiight), and the carrots' cooked-ness.

I'm curious about adding greens to it - spinach or kale. I originally wanted to add Tofu, but my pot was full ... and anyway tofu doesn't add anything flavor-wise. It's good. I like tofu, but it's role is mainly as a protein booster, not a flavor or quality additive. I originally wanted to add sweet corn (for more nutrients!) but intuition told me not to.

#recipe