The Dreaded Veggie…

I am a carnivore.  I am indirectly responsible for the deaths of thousands of chickens and at least 14 entire cows, a lake full of fish, a small herd of pigs, and the occasional duck.  I’ve even taken out the odd plate of gator, a handful of sheep, a crockpot full of wild boar, and more than a few moose and deer.  I have hunks of elk in my freezer right now.  I say this not to mortify any vegans who may be reading this, but to emphasize how unenthusiastically I approach vegetarian meals.  I can look at a key lime pie and be slightly annoyed that it’s a meatless dish…  Nonetheless, I am committed to finishing Dinnertime, and Ree Drummond must be a closet vegan disguised in cattle-rancher clothing.  For all the many tasty beef and chicken dishes in this book, she still snuck in a quite a few horrors like Tofu Lettuce Wraps.  Yeah, I have that to look forward to…  Thank goodness, recipe #106, Veggie Chili, equaled more than the sum of its parts!

I love chili.  Chili CON CARNE.  Imagine my disappointment when I read the recipe ingredients (almost a whole page long by the way!) and it stayed vegetarian to the end… I was hoping she’d come to her senses halfway through and throw in some meat!  Sigh.  But hey, it started out with some really promising vegetables: lots of onions of course, a ton of garlic, celery, zucchini, and carrots.  She had this crazy idea about using WHOLE red, green, and yellow peppers, but that is sheer madness, and I subbed in about four of those mini-sweet peppers instead.  I’ll give a nod toward pepper usage, but I’m not going whole-hog.  Or “whole-hummus”, since this is vegetarian…  Other than the extensive amount of chopping required, this is a super simple recipe.  All the veg goes in a stockpot, and they sweat out for about seven minutes.  Next, a truly delicious spice blend gets dumped on top, and really this is what HAS to be right when you are making chili.  If the seasoning is good, it doesn’t matter if it’s white, chicken, green, or even vegan chili; it will transform into the comfort food everyone knows and loves!  This mix was Kosher salt, chili powder, cumin and oregano.  And you know what?  I didn’t add a grain of salt more than she suggested.  It was perfect.

The rest of the “cooking” was mostly limited to opening cans.  Black, pinto and kidney beans went in, plus a can of chickpeas (or look for garbanzo beans, same thing, if your store seems not to carry them.)  Then a can of tomato sauce and one of diced tomatoes (I used the garlic and basil variety).  Now here’s where I kind of went off the rails.  I was supposed to pour three cups of veggie broth over all this, but guess what I don’t normally have in my pantry?  And so my vegan meal was “contaminated” by chicken broth!  Thank God.  The final touch was the thickening element.  It smelled amazing, it looked appetizing, but I think another hallmark of a good chili is the sauce, and it was still somewhat thin.  Ree’s method is to use a masa slurry, and I am stealing this idea for future use!  Masa is just corn flour, and a slurry is just water and a thickening agent whisked together.  1/4 cup of masa in a 1/2 of water produced a thickener that actually possessed a flavor that worked in the dish, instead of the flavorlessness of corn starch and the “flouriness” of regular all-purpose flour.  So now it was perfect.  Almost…  I just had to add one last ingredient…