Meatless Monday: Quick Vegetarian Chili

It's let's-try-to-pare-down-our-food-budget week at Theohaus, which means that I'm trying to stack recipes with overlapping ingredients to cut down on our food waste.  Since I can never manage to use a whole can of chipotles at once, that means we have several Mexican/Southwestern-inspired recipes coming up, so that I can look forward to some Chipotle Meatballs from Rick Bayless (via Elise at Simply Recipes.)


Now that the temperature has dropped a little, it's chili weather.  This is the only vegetarian chili I have ever made more than once.  It's quick (~30 minutes), filling, quite tasty, and reheats well.  It also sneaks in a fair bit of vegetables and healthy grains to undo the Chuy's damage from last night.   I usually make this when I have guacamole lying around (especially if it's THIS guacamole, which is worth making your whole house smell irreversibly of garlic for a week).


From Cooking Light:


Quick Vegetarian Chili

2 tsp canola oil
1 cup chopped onion
1 cup chopped red bell pepper (or orange or yellow)
2 tsp chili powder
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp dried oregano
3-4 garlic cloves, minced
4.5 oz chopped green chiles
2/3 cup quick-cooking barley
1/4 cup water
15 oz black beans, drained
14.5 oz diced tomatoes, undrained
1 cup chicken or vegetable broth


Heat the oil in a Dutch oven over medium-high heat.  Add onion and bell pepper and saute for 3 minutes.  Add chili powder through green chiles and cook for 1 minute.  Stir in remaining ingredients and bring to a boil.  Cover, reduce heat, and simmer for 20 minutes.  Serve with sour cream and tortilla chips.

Confession:

The primary reason I have been so bad about posting is not that I haven't been cooking.  I'll admit, while we were getting our house ready to go on the market, I was not cooking nearly as often as I usually do.  But the real reason for my unblogginess was this: 

I take terrible food pictures.  

It's probably reasonable to blame maybe  20-30% of this on my camera, which is your basic point and shoot.  But I'd wager at least 70% of the fault is my own camera ignorance.  Yes, I could take a class or maybe even an online tutorial.  But I'd rather be eating.


So I made a decision: I"ll continue to post what I'm cooking (and eating), but please excuse me if I use photos from other sources most of the time.

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With that out of the way:

Patrick has been telling me for almost ten years that I don't know what good Tex-Mex food tastes like.  The one time I was in Texas I was underwhelmed by the place he took me (he swears they were having an off day).  So when Chuy's came to Nashville last year, I was not signing up to wait in an hour-plus line for Tex-Mex, no matter how good the creamy jalapeno dip might be.  


Now that there's a midtown location and Sunday evening mass gets out at 6:00 though ... Chuy's is right there, and let's face it: we've gone to all the other walkable restaurants after mass at least five times.  So tonight I caved.    And the verdict?  Not bad.   There were some parts that were pretty good.  We started with the queso - because who can say no to hot cheese and meat that you can spoon onto a chip?  Our waiter was eager to recommend a secret menu item: a steak enchilada with boom-boom sauce in combo with one of their chile rellenos.   The enchilada was pretty good; although the steak was not super flavorful, the boom boom was tasty.  The relleno on the other hand?  Awesome.  That was one spicy poblano, with really tender chicken inside and a smoky ranchero sauce outside.  That will definitely be a repeater.    


And the creamy jalapeno dip?  I'm not going to lie, I poured it all over everything on the plate.   But what I would really like to do is take a bowl of that over to Outback and pour it all over some bacon cheese fries.