vegetarian corn chili

 

Up until today, I'd never made a vegetarian chili. I was inspired to make it by my friend Suzanne who served it at her dinner party over the weekend, leaving a crowd of non-vegetarians totally satisfied. I love vegetarian food (to some extent - tempeh and mungbeans freak me out) and I've learned to appreciate vegetables in starring roles rather than supporting roles. I love the variety of different flavours and textures you get when making vegetables the main focus of a meal. I also find that when I'm eating too much meat, I notice. I love meat in small quantities, but I begin to feel the cumulative effect of too much meat; I begin to feel really heavy and gross. I don't have the strongest digestive system out there, and I find that I feel a lot better when I have less meat in my diet, while still maintaining a proper nutritional balance.

So if you're feeling a little meat heavy, throw together this chili. It's chock full of vegetables and you can use up all those old relics you have languishing in your fridge. Feel free to swap vegetables in or out to your liking. You can also use kidney beans instead of pinto if that floats your boat. I've had a can of pinto beans in my cupboard for a few months that just wasn't getting eaten, so I used those. They were a little softer than kidney and they broke down a little bit. This softness helped to maintain a balance of textures when paired with the chunky vegetables.

pasta e fagioli soup

I have an irrational distaste for certain pasta shapes. I almost never buy macaroni - even if I'm making "macaroni" and cheese. You can forget rigatoni. Farfalle is another scorned pasta, but sometimes it does find its way into my kitchen. Then it sits there for 6 months while I purchase more desirable shapes like shells or spaghettini.

Eventually I come to the realisation that I should probably use the farfalle. This happened the other day and resulted in a comforting and filling pasta e fagioli, which was inspired by the lovely and amazing Shutterbean.

cannellini bean salad with lemon and cilantro

Ever since my semester ended last week, I've been doing what Adam and I call 'wifing' (said, of course, with tongue-in-cheek amusement. Our sense of humour isn't always politically correct). While he goes off to work, I do all kinds of fun stuff like cleaning. Really, I've been doing more cooking and baking than cleaning. I've also been doing a lot of reading, researching, blogging, tweeting... It's been a blast. I can't remember ever enjoying myself so much! When I was slogging through my Bachelor's degree, I only found this level of relaxation in the days rolling up to the new semester.

I took my lovely and amazing cousin out to Westmount today to stop by our favourite used bookstore. Of course, this also necessitated a visit to Le Fournil, the second most delicious bakery in the city (the first being Fous Desserts, where they make the most ridiculous almond croissants known to man). By the time we were headed home, I realised that the house was still in the same state of absolute horror that it was when I left in the morning (think scenes from The Walking Dead) and I had barely enough time to get supper on the table and get things under control (thanks in part to the above-mentioned lovely and amazing cousin!).