Vegan Black Bean Chili and Mom's Corn Bread

I didn't choose this to be vegan on purpose. I do try to keep the recipes mostly vegetarian so I'm healthy by accident, but this was vegan by accident. I made some haphazard version of this once when Danielle came to visit, but as I progressed in the recipe here and tried to stay on point, I realized I had REALLY improvised on previous attempts.

This is what the recipe said it would look like. It also said to make this in a pressure cooker and I was like "What the heck is that?!" and moved on with my life using a slow cooker.

My mother informed me that this was basically the opposite of what it wanted us to use.

Everything's here! Don't look too closely for the red pepper. It isn't there. Gross.

Mmm...

We found those mysterious chipotle chilis in adobo sauce near the taco supplies at Superstore.

Boy, there was a lot...

 I could NOT get this picture centered. Lotsa beans! This one either, apparently.

Layers of chili...

We had so much chipotles left over, Mom froze them for other recipes. We also only used one tablespoon instead of too. I took one look of all the seeds in the first and thought it would be wise to stop there.

 Little known fact about my mom: she makes the best corn bread muffins in the whole world. Seriously. They're better than any corn bread I've had even in the South. I begged her to make some to go with this chili.

Measuring the butter in water. She also does this with peanut butter.

Key to this recipe is barely mixing the wet ingredients with the dry. She ensures this by using a fork.

She made a few big ones especially for me :)

All done! Now with cheese!

These are onions and chilis… I will explain later.

Soooo before when I've made this I usually use shallots, omit the chilis, and add some kidney beans. We also couldn't find a small enough can of crushed tomatoes so we used diced this time. We discovered one downfall of closely following the recipe is that you feel obligated to use a whole onion when you can clearly see it's going to be too much onion. I hate recipes that ask you to use a whole or even two onions like this. No one likes that much onion in their food. Mom especially hates it because they give her stomach aches so as a rule we generally use less onion than called for. Even though we used only half the amount of onions in the recipe (one instead of two) it was a ridiculous amount of onion. It was also a little bit spicy but I have a low tolerance for spice so maybe it was ok for normal people. It was also super watery so after about an hour or two of cooking, I took about 3 ladle-fulls of liquid out. I ended up leaving the leftovers in the crockpot on for about 5 hours total and it was better after that. When I brought it to Danielle for lunch the next day, she said it resembled more like salsa and actually added more water due to the dryness. Probably if you started this in the morning with all the liquid it would be fine by dinner. Mom's corn bread was, as per usual, amazing. 

Here is her recipe:

Mom's Cornmeal Muffins:

1 cup all purpose flour (she used the robin hood fibre flour this time, just as good)

3/4 cup cornmeal

3 Tbsp. granulated sugar

1 Tbsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

1 egg

2/3 cup milk

1/3 cup butter, melted

Preheat oven to 425F. Butter 10 muffin cups. In a medium sized bowl, combine flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Mix with fork.

In a small bowl, beat together egg, milk, and butter. Add to dry ingredients all at once, stirring just until flour is moistened. Quickly pour batter into prepared muffin cups, filling two-thirds full. Bake for about 20 minutes or until golden brown. Makes 10-12.