vegetable and bean chili with tofu.

Last night we made a vegetable chili with crumbled tofu, based mostly on a Mark Bittman  recipe from his book Food Matters. We've borrowed this book from the library a few times now, and keep coming back to it. The recipes are easy, tasty, and he provides practically ten different variations for each dish. So it's kind of like a choose your own adventure book, for cooking!

The base of the chili is a mix of eggplant, zucchini, carrots, garlic and onion. How can you go wrong?

As I was making it yesterday, I added a can of crushed tomatoes instead of whole peeled tomatoes (not what I was planning to do. Reading the can would have helped. . .) -- so the color/taste was a bit redder and more tomato-y than I would have liked. I added some sugar to cut the acidity, but I think whole tomatoes would have been the way to go. We also added some chopped kale and eliminated the mushrooms from the recipe (again, not on purpose. When I got to the register at the supermarket the cellophane on the mushrooms was pierced, and I had no motivation to go back and get a new container).

So, I guess that tells you -- it's a pretty flexible recipe -- and one I'd definitely make again. Maybe we'd add some black beans and corn, and garnish with an avocado.

We added the cilantro and chile peppers on top instead of putting it into the pot, because I wanted to try giving some chili to the kids.  Guess what? They wouldn't eat it!

If you'd like to try it, here's a link to the original recipe. Let me know if you try it out and how you vary the ingredients to make it your own.