Almost vegan chili

February 2, 2025 10:16 PM

It was a really bright and sunny day yesterday. But it was also cold. I mean, it wasn't single digit cold, but it was still pretty cold that I regretted not bundling up more when I went out for dinner last night.

So what's good on a cold day? Chili. I really like making chili because it's super easy, makes a big batch, and the leftovers are always great. But I also feel like I've consumed a lot of meat this week already so I wanted to make a vegetarian dish. One of my friends is vegan, and he'll often make chili, and it's always so good to eat at the end of dance game session.

Pick up Limes recently put out a recipe for spicy chili and I figured this was a good time to give it a try. In the past when I've made "vegan" recipes, I would completely un-veganize it by replacing some of it with meat or slapping some bacon on it. This recipe calls for "veggie ground", and I know I could replace it with some ground meat. But not today! I am actually going to try to make this vegan.

I don't really know where to get veggie ground though, so I decided to buy lentils instead. I had actually never cooked lentils before. But they're super cheap, and I just followed the package instructions. It looks like you just boil it until it's done.

And yeah, the recipe was very easy! I'd say the hardest part of all this was opening all the cans. I don't know if this is a common problem, but I have so much trouble opening cans. I can never make a single clean cut. The can opener always detaches from the can at some point while I'm spinning it. And every can that I tried to open yesterday took more attempts than the previous one.

Other than that, this was smooth sailing, and the chili wasn't too bad! But what makes it better are the toppings. I bought an avocado because it seems like every food blogger likes to top chili with avocado. It's pretty, but honestly, eh, it's not my favorite chili topping. The pickled onions were great though. Vegan chili is pretty good, but I still found myself missing something in this.

So I added cheese. Aaaand now it's not vegan anymore. But it's still vegetarian! I also tried toasting a corn tortilla and crumbling that up, and I really liked it but it kind of looked like a mess at that point, so I didn't take a photo of it.