Green Tomato Chili

Green Tomato Chili with corn chips, cheese, sour cream and guac

Chili with cilantro - the "diet version"

With an incredibly mild Fall, we are left with a pan of green tomatoes even though it's past the middle of October already.  Craig had been hankering for some chili so I decided to use the green tomatoes in the recipe to use them up.

Soak 3 cups of dried beans overnight.  I used a combination of pinto, kidney and black beans.  This swelled up to about 6 cups.  A few cans of beans could be used too.  After soaking, cook the beans until done.  I used my trustee pressure cooker - takes about 45 minutes.

Use a few cans of crushed tomatoes or tomato sauce or grind up 8 cups of tomatoes in a Vitamix.

Brown 2 pounds of beef -chunks or ground, in a large stock pot with a swig of oil, onion, garlic, bell peppers, and a jalapeno pepper. 

Do not drain any of the fat, add 2 tsp of cumin seeds, a table spoon or 2 of chili powder, 2 teaspoons of paprika, 2 teaspoons of cumin powder, salt and pepper.  Fry a minute or so until fragrant, then add in the tomatoes, canned or sauce, green or red!

Cook for an hour or so until flavors are blended and some of the liquid has evaporated.  While the green tomato sauce tasted tomatoey, it was pretty mild so I added a squeeze of double tomato paste to the mix.

This is what it looked like after about an hour of simmering.  The beans are still cooking in the pressure cooker.

Beans are super soft. Add beans to chili and continue to simmer until you can't take the aroma and more and must eat now.  I added some more chili powder, salt and pepper.  Six cups of beans are bland.

Chili is always better when allowed to slowly simmer and especially reheated the next day.  If you're impatient like me.  This whole process takes about 3 hours.  I started at 9:00 this morning and served the chili for lunch by noon along with some shredded cheddar cheese, sour cream, cilantro, guacamole, and corn chips.

Astrid