Red Bean and Sweet Potato Chili

Mom found this recipe online for Black Bean and Butternut Squash Chili.  She made it once.  It's good.  Real good.  Tomorrow we have a fellowship meal after church, so I decided to make some chili for it.  Now I didn't have any black beans or butternut squash so I substituted kidney beans and sweet potatoes, respectively.  So I'm calling it Red Bean and Sweet Potato Chili.

First I diced the veg: onion, garlic, chili peppers, jalapenos, and the sweet potato.

Sauteed, actually sweated it in a pot until the potatoes were tender-crisp.

Then I added tomato juice and the seasoning.

Now for tomorrow I'm going to put in the the crock pot and let it cook back at church until we are ready to eat it.  I tasted some to see how it is.  Yum yum!  It's good.  Will be even better tomorrow when it cooks some more.

Stuff like this is what I like to do as a chef; take something that everybody knows and make it my own.  Do different things.  Substitute black beans for red beans, butternut squash for sweet potatoes.  Stuff like that.  I hate being tied down to a recipe.  I used to be like that, back in the day when I first started cooking.  It was not good.  The other week I was talking to Jeff at work.  He has plenty of cooking experience.  Ha, I think he has been cooking for about as long as I have been alive.  Anyway, we were talking about this.  He complemented me on doing different things.  Thinking outside the box, to borrow that tired cliche.  He said that for 15+ years he was stuck in the pot and just cooked according to recipes, etc.  It was only in the past 5 years that he has been doing different stuff, stuff that he wants to do, stuff outside the box, and he has been getting more recognition for that then when he was stuck in the pot.  So this is good.  I will continue to do my thing in the culinary scene.

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by Mark Mathis