Sometimes you do need to "throw all your eggs into one basket"...
or at least... that is true if your basket is a pot... and you are making chili or soup.
>>wink<<
Being a busy weekend, the daughter graciously decided to make a pot of "leftover chili"... no doubt, a tendency born after years and years of seeing me make a soup out of whatever we had on hand. This kind of food... "risen from the ashes" of all the leftovers in the fridge or what-not... is perhaps one of the most scrumptious of dinners.
One of the items we got from Alvie Fourness of Wooleylot Farms this week; was a container of radish seed pods.... which are essentially, the pods you get when radish plants go to seed. They taste like radishes... but somehow, are crisper and a little sweeter. They would be perfect in salads, or even pickled... but the daughter decided to throw some of them in the pot for chili... and worked up from there.
She added at least 6 cups of water as a base.
Fresh from the Farm Market, and chopped into pieces... she added yellow onions, tiny white onions, long green beans, baby "nubbins" potatoes (teeny tiny potatoes of several varieties), garden tomatoes, zucchini squash and yellow crookneck squash. From the freezer, she added peppers (yellow, green, and orange), garlic scapes, and sweet corn -- which was all local produce that we froze for long term use.
From the store... she added spaghetti squash that we had cooked earlier in the week and had some leftover; as well as a can of organic pinto beans and a can of chopped tomatoes with peppers.
She also added some leftover basmati rice we had in the fridge. Why not... it was there.
Cooking in the crock pot, she let it simmer for the entire afternoon... adding salt, pepper and a tiny bit of cumin, some sriracha sauce, and some fresh sage and chives from the herb pots on the patio.
**(on the sriracha... just add a little. As the temp of the dish raises, so does the "heat" factor of this sauce... so you can just use a little; and then add more if you want it. She put about 1 tsp in; and in the end, it had a bit of kick to it)**
This dish is completely vegan.
You could add cheese on top; or some ground sausage into this if you wanted to.
We served it in large bowls, with fresh bread (which was also from the Farmer's Market and the fine folks at Card Creek Trading Post)
... and we couldn't be happier.
See you all tomorrow.
