An approach to making bean and vegetable chili

[packbat]

This isn't super a recipe? It's a bit loosey-goosey, but maybe it'll get y'all started. Or us started, if we go another several months without making it and forget what we're doing.

• The basic concept is: put a bunch of stuff in the cooking vessel, cook until the beans are done and soft and tasty.
• It works stovetop or slow cooker - again, we don't aim for a time, we aim for the beans being cooked.
• We use dry beans. We assume canned beans will work, and we intend to give 'em a go, but we always just take a pound of dry beans and soak them overnight.
  • If they're black beans, we can reserve some of the soaking liquid to add more black bean flavor to the final chili; if they're red beans, we just drain 'em and rinse 'em, because Wikipedia says something about phytohemagglutinin being a problem.
• If we use meat, we brown it first, usually with the onions, but we don't usually use meat. We do add olive oil if we're not using meat, because fat is flavor and I think the oil absorbs some flavors that mostly-water doesn't.
• The key to chili is chili peppers - take out the seeds and chop them up small. These can be mixed and matched to taste; lately we've just been using poblanos because they're sold in packages of several at the nearby grocery. We also add powdered cayenne.
• We always use onion and some tomato source. Dried tomatoes are good, tomato paste is good, canned tomatoes are good, fresh tomatoes don't ... dissolve? as well so it makes for a different texture, but they're good.
• Vegetables: we're told you can put in basically anything. We've used kale (the tomato adds enough acidity to make it not sad), corn, bok choi, broccoli, potato, bell pepper (we usually use bell pepper) ... just put stuff in there, it's probably going to be solid.
• Liquid: we always use broth. Lately we've been favoring a soup base branded "Better Than Bouillon", which is nice because it's a paste and it doesn't add as much liquid (in case tomatoes or corn or whatever have their own liquid), but in the past we've used grocery store cartons of broth. The goal is to just cover everything - beans and vegetables.
• Spices: oregano, cumin, garlic powder if you don't use fresh garlic, onion powder if you don't use onions, paprika. Today we tried also putting in a couple bay leaves and removing them after forty-five minutes on the stovetop; it was good, we'll do it again.
• If the liquid starts getting low (which doesn't usually happen by our standards, being as we're aiming for a sauce to put on pasta and not a soup), then cover the pot.
• We tend to stir pretty often, probably because ADHD.

It's good! Does the job for us to replace the canned stuff.