Vegetarian Chili

Wow. I had never made chili before, had never even been a big chili eater. To be quite honest, the only chili I had every tried was in 7th grade when I would get a Frito Pie on Fridays (looking back now just the thought of it gives me heartburn!) needless to say it was the canned kind which was anything but delicious.

And so when I came across a recipe for vegetarian chili in my new Eat-Clean Diet Cookbook it wasn't the word chili that aroused my appeal, rather it was the FOUR different kinds of beans in the recipe. I'm a bean fanatic, I love them all, they're delicious. And so I though, four kinds of beans, this has to be good! And it was.

I tweaked the recipe only very slightly around what I had in the pantry and so my recipe looked something like this (I ended up only using 3 kinds of beans, but it came out amazing!):

1 medium yellow onion, chopped
4-5 cloves of garlic, minced
1 red bell pepper, chopped
1 carrot, chopped

3 teaspoons salt, or to taste
Ground black pepper to taste
2 tablespoons ground cumin
3 tablespoons chili powder
1 tablespoon oregano

Juice of one lime

1 can crushed tomato
1 can black beans
1 can pinto beans
1 can kidney beans
1 can corn kernels

1 box low sodium chicken broth (or vegetable broth) 32 fl oz

4 squares dark chocolate (at least 75%)

Saute all the vegetables in a little olive oil until soft, add the seasonings. Then add the rest of the ingredients and let simmer at least 20 minutes and longer if you want it to thicken. Seriously, it's that simple.

Make sure you rinse the beans and corn before adding it to the pot since that will seriously lessen the amount of sodium (by at least 50%!) in the final recipe.