{Recipe} Crockpot Chili

Posted by Ethne~

Hey dudes!

It is totally chili weather here in Minnesota, so I decided to make some crockpot chili the other day and picked up a new Mrs. Dash seasoning packet, thinking I could dump everything into the pot in the morning and be done.

Let’s see how it turned out, shall we?

Chili in the crockpot is about the best thing ever, really.  You’ll need:

4 cups of roasted tomato and veggie puree (remember when I made that here?)

-or-

2 large cans of diced tomatoes – the ones that still have some tomato chunks in them, but this is flexible, so if you have some other type of tomatoes in your cupboard, go with it

1 lb ground beef

[1 medium yellow onion, diced – if you go with the cans of tomatoes (my puree has onion roasted with it)]

1 diced pepper (I had a red pepper thanks to Easy Mac throwing one in the cart, but use green or yellow if you want, any would be good)

Mrs. Dash packet (optional…)

Chili powder (recommended, and for sure if you use diced tomatoes)

1 can black beans

1 can great northern beans

I didn't catch a pic of the puree or burger, but you can imagine, k?

Brown the ground beef.

Dump it all in your crockpot.  If you do this in the morning, put it on low.  If you do this at noon-ish, put it on high.  Stir it when you dump it all in.

Chili mixed up after dumping it all together.  See how those beans are smaller than pinto? (See below note for why that makes sense.)

Stir it every hour or so if you’re home, and taste it once it’s nice and warm to see if you want to add more chili powder.  Maybe a little salt & pepper?

~I found that the Ms. Dash packet was completely worthless and had no taste whatsoever.  It smelled really good when I opened it, so maybe I just added too many ingredients?  I ended up adding about 4+ tablespoons of chili powder until it tasted good and chili-like to me.~

All done with chili powder added ~ it makes the color darker and smells so yummy!

Enjoy!  This is great for a party since you don’t have to hardly think about it.  In fact, I will be serving it for the girls’ Vikings birthday party in a few weeks.  I’ll explain in a few posts from now why in the world my girls are having a football-themed party.

Note on the beans: I discovered a few years ago that black beans and northern beans are smaller, softer and a little better for you than pinto beans.  Shaun also stated that he doesn’t care for beans in chili, and since I do, this was a great compromise since if you can’t taste them as much (ie, they don’t have as much of a presence), yet they’re still there, we can both eat the bean-ti-ful chili.  [Hello run-on sentence.]