I have been looking for a replacement for a favorite canned chili that is the victim of inflation and is now almost $6 a can. I like it, but I don’t like it THAT much. After many chili disappointments, I finally found a chili recipe I’ll make again: Nora Cooks Ultimate Vegan Chili. Billed as an award-winning vegan chili recipe, I decided to give this a try, and this did not disappoint.

This was excellent. Next time, I will add one more can of beans so the ratio of tomatoes to beans is more even, and I’ll add carrots and maybe peppers. I really liked a tri-bean blend of pintos, black beans and kidney beans. I love tofu, but even I was skeptical about the tofu as a ground beef substitute. But it was really good. We do a lot of roasting, so I used a similar approach: toss the crumbled tofu in olive oil and then add the spices and soy sauce and mix it to coat evenly. Making the paste did not seem necessary.

We decided to make some sour cream using canned coconut cream. After scooping the cream out of the can, we had plenty to make this sour cream recipe. It was darn good. I don’t know if I would have known the difference if someone had served it to me. This recipe from The Wooden Skillet uses just a few ingredients. We served this Cincinnati chili-style served over spaghetti and topped it with crispy onions and sour cream. It was easy to freeze some of the leftovers.

Here’s a handy dried bean-to-canned conversion.

Celery soup redux

We often make a bean salad sandwich which I love. Lots of protein, it’s easy to make and very tasty. I like to add celery to it, and inevitably, that means we wind up with most of a package of celery as leftovers. We made this soup a while ago and liked it (it has yummy! handwritten in the corner.) So it was worthy of another go. We made some changes this time because it seemed a little plain the first time, AND we used our poor, neglected slow cooker so we could cook lunch while we worked.

We did sauté the onion, celery and garlic, but we sauteed all of it. Because we used an immersion blender, we didn’t need to have some celery set aside.

We also added about 2 teaspoons of herbes de Provence (or 3 generous wooden scoops of the Trader Joe’s version). After we had it going, I had the idea to add potato. So we peeled and diced a large potato and microwaved it in a dish with some water for three minutes (it was still firm at that point). We cooked the soup on high for about three hours. Added the crazy-good homemade sour cream, fried onions and fresh cilantro.

Photo by Shelley Pauls on Unsplash