Recipe

Chilli sin carne with rice

Name: Chilli sin carne with rice
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 35 min
Total time: 50 min
Yield: 2 servings
Ingredients: 1 can kidney beans (400 g, drained and rinsed); 1 can black beans (400 g, drained and rinsed); 1 can chopped tomatoes (400 g); 1 piece onion (finely chopped); 1 piece red pepper (diced); 3 clove garlic (minced); 2 tsp ground cumin; 2 tsp smoked paprika; 0.5 tsp chilli flakes (or more, to taste); 1 tbsp tomato purée; 15 g dark chocolate (70% or higher); 200 ml water or vegetable stock; 3 tbsp olive oil; 150 g long-grain rice; salt, lime and coriander (to finish)

The first time I properly batch cooked, I made six portions of chilli on a Sunday afternoon and felt like a man who had solved his own life.

By Wednesday I was eating chilli with the enthusiasm of somebody completing a form. By Thursday I had begun adding things to it in an attempt to make it a different dish: cheese one day, a fried egg the next, a tortilla wrapped around it on the Friday in what I now recognise as an act of desperation. By Saturday I could not look at it. I did not make chilli again for about a year, which is an absurd punishment for a dish that had done nothing wrong.

The lesson took me embarrassingly long to work out. Batch cooking is not cooking one thing six times. It is cooking two things three times, or three things twice, and putting most of it in the freezer rather than the fridge so that the week has a choice in it. Six identical containers lined up in a fridge is not meal prep. It is a sentence, and you serve it in full.

So: make this, eat two portions, and freeze the rest flat in bags. Four weeks later one of them surfaces on an evening when you have nothing in and no intention of cooking, and it is comfortably the best thing that happens to you that week.

The chilli itself is beans, and unlike a great many vegan versions of meat dishes it is not pretending to be anything. A chilli was always mostly beans. Three tins here, two kinds, with a tin of tomatoes, an onion, a great deal of cumin and smoked paprika, and a square of dark chocolate stirred in at the end, which sounds like a gimmick and is the one thing that makes people ask what is in it.

Rice underneath. Lime if you have it.

Prep 15 min
Cook 35 min
Serves 2
Cost €

Method

1
Cook the onion and red pepper in the oil over medium heat with a pinch of salt until soft and beginning to colour.

10 min
2
Add the garlic, cumin, paprika, chilli flakes and tomato purée. Stir for a full minute until the spices smell toasted rather than dusty.

2 min
3
Add the tomatoes, both tins of beans and the water. Simmer uncovered, stirring occasionally, until thick enough that a spoon leaves a trail.

25 min
4
Crush some of the beans against the side of the pot with a spoon. This is what turns it from beans in sauce into chilli.

2 min
5
Stir in the chocolate off the heat until it disappears, then taste and adjust the salt and the heat.

2 min
6
Serve over rice with lime and coriander. Cool the rest completely before it goes into bags for the freezer.

2 min

Ingredients laid out for a chilli sin carne with two kinds of bean, served with rice: two opened tins, an opened tin of chopped tomatoes, an onion part chopped and a red pepper part diced, 2 garlic cloves.

A pair of hands grates dark chocolate straight into a deep pot of chilli with a microplane, fine dark shavings falling and landing on the surface, some already melting into dark streaks.

Variations

A tin of sweetcorn, drained, added at the end. Diced sweet potato with the onion makes it sweeter and stretches it further. Soya mince or crumbled walnuts add a meatier texture (walnuts lose the nut-free flag). A splash of strong coffee alongside the chocolate deepens it. Serve in a wrap, over baked potato, or with tortilla chips and avocado. Freezes flat for 3 months and is arguably better after freezing.

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