Easy Veggie Chili

Our slow cooker has been collecting dust on our shelf of small kitchen appliances since moving a year and a half ago! I really have been meaning to use it sooner as we inherited it from Paul's family and I wanted to test it out. I used to love eating vegetarian chili when I was growing up that was made in the crock pot. Now, I've made my own version using ingredients that we already had around the house. It was easy to make, used inexpensive ingredients, and made a ton of leftovers for future lunches. Those are all excellent things in my mind!

I soaked/cooked the beans using dry beans the night before by placing a whole ton of beans in the slow cooker and filling it with 2-3" of water above the beans. I let that run on low for 8 hours and put the beans in the fridge overnight.

For the chili, I used:

• 4 cups of pinto beans, already cooked/soaked from dry beans (you could use 3 cans of beans if you aren't preparing them from dried beans)
• 1/2 bag of frozen corn
• 1 can of diced tomatoes, including all juices
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 pepper, diced
• 1 hot pepper, diced
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 pkg tempeh, chopped into small pieces
• 1 tbsp chili seasoning (if you don't have this, you can use 1 tbsp chili powder)
• 1 tsp ground chipotle
• 2 chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, diced, plus two spoonfuls of the adobo sauce (optional)
• few dashes of Tobasco sauce
• salt and pepper to taste

Throw all of the ingredients in the slow cooker, and let it cook on low for 6-8 hours. You can really use any combination of the ingredients above, or you can add different types of beans, tempeh, or whatever you'd like!

You may start to find more slow cooker recipes on this blog in the coming weeks as this was such a great success!