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.

Some southwest inspired meals

March 6, 2021 9:59 PM

For some reason, I keep buying milk at the grocery store, then realizing it's about to expire so I scramble to find something to make with it, and then once it's gone I end up buying another quart of milk because I need it for something else.

Anyway, this time when I looked up recipes that use milk, I came across this Chili Cornbread Skillet. So I read the recipe and it looked pretty simple. Make some chili, mix up some cornbread mix, put it on top of the chili and then bake it.

The only thing I wasn't sure about was What pot or pan do I use? The recipe said to use a 4qt skillet. I don't know if most pans are labeled with their volume, but mine aren't. I had a deep skillet that I wanted to use, but I wasn't sure if it was big enough. So I actually went and measured 4 quarts of water and started dumping it in this skillet. Turns out it only holds 3.5qt. Alright, I'll use my pot instead.

Look at all that extra room in the pot! I totally could have used my skillet! That would have been so much better and so much more aesthetic. Plus I had preheated my oven not realizing how close the two racks were and then I needed to awkwardly remove one to make the pot actually fit.

Overall, this recipe was alright. A good number of commenters said that this was bland and I have to agree with them. I doubled the amount of salt, but I think I should have doubled all the spices. The cornbread was also kind of bland. It needed more sugar at least. And maybe the whole thing needs more cheese because I barely noticed it in between the chili and the cornbread.

I really enjoyed the leftovers though. I reheated the cornbread part in the toaster oven and the chili part in the microwave, which worked out well.

Today I made another southwest-y dish: Creamy Chicken Fajita Pasta. The reason I decided to make this was because I happened to have half a block of cream cheese and 2 bell peppers that I needed to use up.

Now this was delicious. I really like the pasta recipes on Budget Bytes. And cream cheese in pasta is great. Problem is, I still don't like leftover pasta, and I have a feeling this will go from a 5/5 meal to a 3/5 meal in leftover form.

Chili with Chocolate Ice Cream

January 29, 2019 5:00 AM

That's right. I saw this Fire and Ice Chili recipe from How Sweet Eats, and I was so intrigued by the fact that she put chocolate ice cream in her chili.

I actually looked for dark chocolate ice cream in three different grocery stores, but I couldn't find it until I went to Whole Foods. And then I spent a whole $9 (!!!) for a Haagen Dazs-sized thing of Jeni's ice cream, which is ridiculous.

Okay, but I gotta admit, Jeni makes pretty good ice cream.

This was a really interesting tasting chili. It was sweeter and less tomato-y than I'm used to, but I liked it. Not sure I'll ever make it again though, mostly because it took two hours, and that ice cream was stupid expensive.

But if I ever see it on sale, I'm totally trying the coffee flavor.