A few weeks after Ben was born, I decided to start cooking one new recipe a week. You know, because I had so much more time. Ha! No, really I was just tired of cooking the same handful of main dishes I always made, and I have roughly ten million recipes on hand from cookbooks and magazines. Plus, the sudden disappearance of my income motivated me to make more of our meals come from the grocery store than from Chili's.
So far, my favorite part of this little experiment has been picking the new recipe each week (usually I get excited and end up making two or three new things). I apparently have a knack for picking duds, though, because none of the new dishes have been blog-worthy yet. Some of them have been fine, but about half of them make Daniel say, "This is good, honey. I'm just...um, not as hungry as I thought I was." Right.
But last night! Last night I found a winner with Three-Bean Vegetarian Chili (that's a link) from Cooking Light magazine. I was pretty sure going in that Daniel would not be a fan. It's healthy, it contains vegetables that are not cooked in butter or wrapped in bacon, it doesn't have any meat, etc. And I was even more sure it would be bad when the preparation took me for-stinking-ever (prep time seems to be inversely proportional to tastiness in my kitchen).
My, how wrong I was! This chili was so good that I couldn't talk about anything else at dinner except how good it was. It has tons of flavor, and the texture is really nice (my mom is laughing at me now because I always have issues with the texture of food). It's really filling because of all those awesome, fibery, proteiny beans. And it's pretty, too:
You should do yourself a favor and jump all over this recipe before winter is over. Be warned that if your cooking expertise is where mine is (read: low), it takes a little time to roast and peel red peppers and figure out how to peel and cube a butternut squash (I would tell you how, but I'm pretty sure my method was not worth imitating). But seriously, this chili is worth the hassle.
5 comments:
that sounds good. i have done the butternut squash, back when i was squeezing pennies and making my own baby food with the girls. seriously why is it that when i have the least amount of free time do i decide to become martha stewart?
anyway, peeling the squash and steaming it was not worth the amount saved - pennies per jar.
i think daniel and clark have the same philosophy of "healthy" eating.
i thought i'd add that this does look very delicious. you should totally make it for us this summer ;)
I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this sort of chili. I've been known to fill a grocery cart up with all kinds of beans and then make a chili out of them. My mom kind of got a little grossed out about it, but it works. Tastes yummy ... perhaps some small gastric issues the next day ... and I probably shouldn't have used "gastric issues" in a sentence in this medium, right? Sorry ... I have no class, do I?
Ha, Megan! I almost made the disclaimer that you shouldn't eat this chili the day before a road trip, but I decided that was TMI.
butternut squash puree babyfood DOES save you a little bit, i promise. disregard steph!!! haha!
that's funny, out of all the recipes in that issue i picked the one with BEEF and BEER. it was actually very very good. now i wonder if threw away the magazine prematurely. oh well. i'm in throw away mode for sure. due to a certain move that consumes me...
i do have another recipe for chili that calls for ground turkey and butternut squash and it is also tremendously good. and, i think it came from cooking lite a few years ago, haha. cooking lite is so worth the money - almost all my favorite recipes have come from it!!
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