Vegetarian Black Bean and Squash Chili

Hey, I'm Louisa Shafia, on eHow.com, and it's hot in the kitchen today. We're making butternut squash and black bean chili with all kinds of spices. So here we go. I've got lots of warming Fall flavors here and the base of my chili where all the flavor is going to come from is some onion and garlic. So I have a hot pan here. I'm putting a little bit of olive oil into my pan and I'm going to start out by caramelizing my onions. I love that sound. So caramelizing the onions really brings out the sweetness, kind of gives them a deep flavor and this is a really nice foundation for the chili. The cool thing about this chili is that it's totally vegetarian. I'm going to add some garlic to my onions now, just let that cook a little bit on its own. Usually when you get chili it's got meat in it and that is really tasty but this one doesn't even need meat because it's got black beans in it. Beans are full of protein. They're full of fiber. They're really rich and satisfying so you can make a great chili that's vegetarian. Okay now I'm going to add in my butternut squash that I diced. Butternut squash is naturally sweet so it's giving my chili a little bit of sweetness and a little bit of color. I'm going to have nice bright orange chunks when this is finished. Now I'm adding some uncooked rice. I've got about two cups there and the rice really helps to give the chili body and hep so it's really satisfying. So by saut?ing my dry rice in here I'm just helping it to get some of the other flavors. I'm going to go ahead and add in my black beans now and I love black beans. I like any excuse to cook with them but you could use whatever bean you like. Okay so now for my spices. This is a really important part of making chili. I'm adding some oregano. I had some fresh oregano around. You can use dry in here, that's just fine. I'm going to add a whole bunch of chili powder. Now chili powder is actually a combination of different spices. It's chili powder, it's cumin, it's coriander, it's allspice but it's really what gives chili that iconic red color and that chili taste. Now I'm putting in some cumin. This is really warming. It also helps you to digest beans so this is a really good idea to add some cumin to your chili every time you make it and these are some Mexican flavors in here, cumin is used a lot in Mexican cooking so is chili powder. Okay I'm adding a pinch of cloves. This is going to give my chili a little bit of a sweet taste and same for cinnamon. I'm just adding a pinch and as your chili cooks, as it goes along, you can taste it if you want to add more of anything, do. Okay, so I'm going to make this into a thick stew. My liquid in here is water, that's what I'm starting out with. I'm also going to add some dark beer. You could use a Porter, you could use a Pilsner but what the beer does in here is it's an acid so it kind of sparks all the other flavors in the chili and brings them alive and as it cooks that beer flavor really mellows and it's kind of sweet and kind of smoky. Same for vinegar, I'm adding some vinegar in here also to spark the flavors. This is another acid. I'm using white wine vinegar but you could use balsamic. You could use apple cider vinegar anything will work and I'm also going to sweeten this with some maple syrup. A lot of times people will add sugar to chili, a little bit of sweetness really helps set of the flavors. Since I like to try to use more natural sweeteners that are less processed, I'm doing maple syrup. You could also add honey. You could add molasses, that's another classic chili ingredient. And of course I want some salt in here. So this is really coming together. This is a great simple dish. Um, and once you cook it you can have this in the fridge on hand for a week and I'm going to bring this to a boil and then I'm going to let it simmer and I want to let this cook for at least three hours so the flavors really marry and come together and my chili thickens up and when it's finished it looks like this. So this is thick and rich, you can see all the different textures in here from the rice and the beans and the squash. It smells really warm. It's got that cinnamon and cloves in the background. Now a classic topping for chili is grated cheese or sour cream. I'm going to use some thick Greek yogurt on here. It's a little bit healthier but it's just as rich and thick so it's going to give me that fattiness to really balance all the spiciness of the chili. This is a great dish for Fall, for lunch, for a tailgating party or for a family dinner. I hope you'll try making it. I'm Louisa Shafia. I'll see you next time on eHow.com.