Ingredients:
8 portobello mushrooms, large dice
1 onion, diced
2 Cajun Belle peppers, diced
1 cup diced Fire Roasted Hatch Green Chiles
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 pint okra, diced
14 oz canned fire roasted tomatoes, drained
10 oz frozen dark red kidney beans
1 teaspoon hot New Mexican chili powder
1 teaspoon mushroom powder*
1/2 teaspoon chili powder
sea salt
freshly ground black pepper
fresh parsley
Directions:
Add all ingredients except the parsley into a 6 quart slow cooker. Stir to evenly distribute the ingredients. Cook on low 6-8 hours. Stir in the parsley prior to serving.
*Powder made from ground dried mushrooms. Make your own or purchase.
My thoughts:
It’s Hatch Green Chile season again! Even though we live far from New Mexico, a store in Annapolis hosted a chile roast. You place an order online for 25 pounds (!) of chiles and then they are ready for you to pick up the following weekend. We are getting better at removing the skin and freezing them, it only took an hour and half this year to get them ready for freezing. We also diced some and refrigerated them so look for more Hatch Chile recipes to come!
Coincidentally, this weekend was also the Mushroom Festival in Kennett Square, PA, the mushroom capital of the world. We had never been before but I am so glad we went! It was seriously the nicest, best run and most fun food festival I’ve ever been to. The food was amazing and fresh and full of mushrooms. There were also a ton of mushroom related products for sale ranging from mushroom condiments to mushroom earrings to cooking tools to giant mushroom hats. They were also selling big boxes of mushrooms! We bought a 5 lb box of portobello mushrooms for only $15. Score! So when faced with 5 lbs of mushrooms and 25 lbs of peppers, it only made sense to make a big vat of chili. On our way back we stopped at an amazing farm stand and picked up even more produce including some pretty okra. Why not add that too? The final chili was wonderful, very rich tasting yet light. It is amazing how an enormous amount of mushrooms (it filled the entire insert of my 6 quart slow cooker) cook down to make an intensely mushroomy final dish. A great vegan addition to my chili and hatch chile line up!