and things went downhill from there

Tonight on "Cooking with plonq" ("vegan" chilli edition):

I had not been anticipating the fierce wind and snow when I planned to make chilli today, but I could not have asked for more appropriate weather.

I started off by making a mirepoix (sort of) by coarsely chopping a couple of small yellow onions, two stalks of celery, and one red bell pepper. I tossed that into a pot with some vegetable oil and chopped four cloves of garlic while the veggies sweated a bit.

I let them cook down while I dug out the next couple of ingredients, then scraped the garlic into the pot and let it get to know the other ingredients for a minute or so before I squeezed in the last of our tube of tomato paste, and a teaspoon or so of anchovy paste.

I stirred that for a minute or so to cook the raw flavour off of the tomato paste and then dumped in an unseemly amount of chilli powder, some ground cumin, and about a half-tablespoon of dark cocoa powder. As soon as that was starting to want to stick to the bottom, I reached for the can of tomatoes -- and caught myself just in time.

I'd totally forgotten the "meat".

I fetched the two packages of Impossible ground burger from the fridge and hastily dumped them into the pot along with a splash of more oil. Then I spent the next few minutes stirring it and breaking it up until it was cooked through before I resumed where I'd left off earlier.

Once the "meat" was done, I poured in a large can of chopped, fire-roasted tomatoes, a small tin of chipotle peppers with their sauce, and a large can (drained and rinsed) of red kidney beans. I swished some water into the cans from the tomatoes and peppers and added that but it still seemed a bit dry, so I mixed up about 300ml of vegetable bouillon and stirred that in along with a bit more chilli powder, cumin, and some ground black pepper.

I let everything simmer together for a few minutes before tasting it. Other than adding a few good shakes of hot paprika to give it a bit more punch, I didn't think it needed anything. I'm glad that I didn't add any salt - it got enough from the bouillon.

I think it might have been improved by the addition of a couple of bay leaves, and/or some fine-chopped fresh chilli peppers. But overall, it was good. Paired well with the honey cornbread I made as a side dish.

For lunch today I decided to clear out a couple of items that have been in the freezer since last year.

I reheated the last serving of the vegetarian (almost vegan) chilli I made last year and served it over pasta that I rolled out from some dough I froze last year.

When I say that the chilli is almost vegan, it's because I added an ingredient at the last moment that was not vegan. I had not set out to make a vegan chilli, but it was only when I added the final ingredient that it occurred to me that it had been vegan up to at point. I don't even remember what that ingredient was now (white sugar, anchovy paste - probably the first, since I vaguely recall kicking myself for not just using agave syrup).

In any event, neither the noodles or the cheese in this dish are vegan - nor am I - so it makes little difference.

The base for this chilli is Beyond Meat which I padded out with texturized vegetable protein when I decided that there was not enough of the former for the size of batch I was making. Other than that, I used vegetable stock instead of beef stock for the liquid, and the rest was fairly standard chilli ingredients. The key thing is that it turned out really good.



I didn't know how the pasta dough would hold up from being frozen, but I let it thaw in the fridge overnight and then rolled it out this morning. It was bouncy and stretchy and all of those things that you want in a pasta dough. Once I had it rolled into a thin enough rectangle on the counter, I dusted it with flower, rolled it up, and cut it into fettuccine-width strips.

The pasta was fine with being frozen, and the resulting noodles held their own with the chilli. I would definitely do this again.

One might reasonably ask if it is worth the effort to make your own pasta, and I would answer that it is. Making pasta turned out to be far less work than I'd have imagined it to be, and the flavour and mouth feel of fresh home-made pasta blows the dried noodles out of the water. The boxed noodles are much more convenient, and I'm not going to stop using them any time soon, but IMO it is worth treating oneself now and then to some good noodles crafted in one's own kitchen.