Three Bean Chili

A couple of weekends back it got a little chilly in Wisconsin and it left me wanting a fall favorite, chili. I have my own version of chili that was handed down to me by watching my mother. It basically involved mixing canned beans and canned diced tomatoes with a packet of seasoning and a pound of ground sirloin. Since we've changed to dry beans, I had to adapt the recipe and adapting I did. But instead of making little changes, I made a lot of big ones.

I started off by sorting and soaking 8 oz. of black beans, 8 oz. of red beans and 8 oz. of kidney beans. Actually I did a quick soak, which involves bringing the water to boil and then turning off the heat and leaving the beans covered for an hour.

After the beans were ready, I chopped up some tomatoes that were just about to go bad and dumped them into a large pot with chopped onion and celery. I also cut up a chipotle pepper to add some spice. I dumped in a couple of packets of McCormick's reduced sodium chili seasoning and then added three cans of fire roasted diced tomatoes. I added tomato juice to make up for some of the liquid I would be losing by not using canned beans. I then let the chili simmer for a couple of hours. Toward the end I then added some left over sweet corn cut fresh from the cob, as well as Morningstar Farms Meatless crumbles.

My results:


The chili was absolutely fantastic and I fear the flavor will be difficult to recreate, partly because the next time I try to make it, I doubt we'll have garden fresh tomatoes and sweet corn on hand. I gotta admit the sweet corn really adds to this. Unfortunately I don't have an exact recipe to share since it involves a lot of tossing in random things. WW pts. = 3 pts. per cup