I love chilli con carne. I generally make vegetarian chilli, as it’s healthier and I usually prefer it, however this recipe, which I found a few years back on BBC Food, is wonderful. It’s rich, spicy and comforting, with ingredients you mostly have knocking around. It’s fantastic on a cold or rainy night, with a couple of glasses of red wine and some good company.
I have tweaked it quite a bit; I added one can of black beans instead of the 2nd can of kidney beans (depending on what I have around), I halved the amount of minced beef, added some red capsicum and sweetcorn and if there’s no red wine available, I add around 50ml balsamic vinegar with 80ml water to replace it – this gives the chilli a slightly sweet flavour which I love however if that doesn’t appeal, just add water (or get your husband/boyfriend to run out to the bottle shop to pick up a decent bottle of red, they’re good at dealing with this type of emergency).
I often serve this chilli with brown rice, sour cream, grated cheese and sliced avocado – somehow chilli seems to go better with brown rice instead of white. A few times, when I’ve had some sweet potato I had to use up, I served the chilli with mashed sweet and white potato with sour cream and that was delicious, sort of like an upside down spicy cottage pie (and everyone knows sweet and spicy go well together). And in fact that’s a great idea! Place some chilli in little ramekins, spoon some mashed sweet potato with a knob of butter on top and bake – those of you with kids would probably be popular after a meal like this (if your kids like chilli that is, I had a dad who was a chilli fiend so I grew up with chilli dishes fairly early).
In any case, give it a try, either from the original recipe or with my amendments.
