Chili

This is the first time I've made chili using ground chicken in place of ground beef. Much better flavor and texture, imo, but ground chicken is quite a bit pricier. I suspect to get ground beef that tasted anywhere near as good would be just as pricey, as it would require extremely choice cuts.

This is also the first time I've put zucchini in chili, and had more peppers than I could actually use from my garden. I did buy one red bell pepper for it. I'm sure I planted at least one red bell pepper, but I don't have any turning red yet. Yellow, purple, and green, yes, but no red. I thought about putting some fresh basil in as well, but I wasn't sure how well the flavor would go with the chili pepper.

Sketch of the recipe: One of each kind of pepper ready in my garden, plus one red bell from the store; roughly half of a medium zucchini, chopped (not quite two cups); one sweet onion; two pounds ground chicken (1.5 might have been better, but they came in one pound packages); lots of chili pepper, my own taco spice mix, some cumin, red pepper, salt, oregano.

Soak beans overnight (or in my case, for roughly 8 hours prior to starting cooking). Boil for two hours. In the meantime, chop everything. Brown and crumble the chicken with the chopped onion and peppers. When mostly done, add taco spices and other seasonings. Add to beans. Add zucchini. Bring to a boil and let simmer for at least an hour, preferably longer.

You can use canned beans but (a) they're more expensive; (b) they add all sorts of bizarre things to them as preservatives.

As I used the last of my taco-spice mix, you can expect me to post my version of it when I dig out my recipe again. ^/^ Again, you can buy taco and chili seasoning packets, which are less expensive if you don't use the separate spices very much, but most of them are made with wheat, presumably because the gluten helps the spices stick.