How to Make Award Winning Chili

Anita Peggie is a very good friend of the Spanishchef. We have been in close contact for a long time exchanging recipes and gardening tips. Anita and Jamie have recently retired from the food trade after 27 years, and now concentrate on writing about food. This is one of Anita’s award winning recipes, and she has very kindly granted us permission to reproduce her recipe on spanishchef.net.

If you follow a healthy, vegetarian lifestyle, then I recommend that you click on the link at the bottom of the article and visit Anita’s site.

My Award Winning Chili – Anita Peggie

I’m going to show you how to make chili, but I’m not going to provide a recipe as such – you don’t need one – it’s so easy! All you need is a bunch of fresh vegetables – all the better if you have grown them yourself. One of the things I love about my garden is picking the fresh vegetables and fruits and thinking what to do with them! When ingredients are this good you don’t need a recipe! If you don’t have home grown stuff available, just use whatever is in season in the shops or market!

So – how do you make a healthy meat free chilli?

Take some onions – chop them up and sweat them in a little vegetable oil, leave them to their own devices – just giving them an occasional stir.

When the onions are soft and golden add some chopped up chilis, or if you don’t have any, some chili powder, and then add the rest of your chopped vegetables, a couple of cans of tomatoes, and a can of chick peas! – That’s it!

You will need to simmer it for only about 20 minutes – it’s much more appetizing if the vegetables retain their colour and texture!

So why is this an award winning recipe?

What makes it so special?

The answer is simple – literally!

It won a place with the “Healthy Living Award”, because it is simple! It uses vegetables that have not been messed about with, or overcooked, or packed with salt or sugar or added fat – and it tastes fantastic!

We couldn’t make enough of it when we had our healthy food business – sometimes it sold out in a couple of hours, especially if people got wind that the vegetables were so fresh that they were actually growing in the garden that very same morning!

So, there’s no great secret – how to make chili is simplicity itself! Serve it as we did, with a baked potato and topped with cheese, or on a bed of brown rice – it’s even good just with a chunk of rustic bread, and because it’s so easy and cheap it’s great for serving to a crowd – especially as a winter warmer on bonfire night or a barbecue

I absolutely love growing chilis – it’s so exciting when you see the fruits appear and change from glossy green to bright red and yellow! We’re going to talk about that next!

My website is all about vegetarian recipes and how to grow the main ingredients, so if you really want to know how to make chili, it makes sense that you would want to also know how to grow them!

Growing chilis is easy!

These peppers are growing happily in Scotland at the end of October – honestly! They have little white flowers that will hopefully grow into peppers – it’s an experiment – total wrong time of year I know, but I am trying to show you just how easy it is!

Roxanne just saved the seeds from some peppers and sowed them – I warned her it was the wrong time of year, but as you can see, it seems she’s proved me wrong!

Chilis and peppers are grown in exactly the same way – she started off 3 seeds in tiny pots, and when she saw that they were outgrowing their pots she repotted them into bigger pots. These are ready to be repotted again – into pots just a bit bigger. The fresh compost will give them a bit of a feed, and she waters them just once a week – they live happily on her bedroom windowsill, and when they fruit I promise you’ll be the first to know!

Growing chilis is cool – and chilis are making the news with lot’s of chili festivals taking place just now – OK lot’s of people think chili means ground beef, but as I’ve shown you, it doesn’t have to – it doesn’t even have to be made with soya – just use beautiful fresh vegetables – once you understand how vegetables work together you’ll be inspired!

Look out for how to make chili sauce, then I’ll give you the recipe!

Copyright (c) Anita Peggie October 2011

Anita’s Easy Vegetarian Recipes

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