Unusual and Award-Winning Chili Recipes
Thick, rich, flavorful…when the temperatures outside drop, the heat quotient of our food choices tend to go up! Whether your favorite is con carne, green, white chicken, no beans, a variety of beans, piled on top of spaghetti or so spicy you need a fire hose to cool off, here are a few unusual, traditional and award-winning chili recipes for winter warm-ups!
Award-Winning and “Best” Ever Chili Recipes
Chili is great on its own, topped with cheese, onions, cilantro, crackers or corn chips, but it’s also great on hot dogs, burgers, baked potatoes, and nachos or served in a bread bowl. This Crockpot Chili Recipe from Mom on Timeout is one of the more traditional and accommodates all those possibilities. The ingredients are plentiful and include spices, beans (two kinds) beef broth, Worcestershire sauce, red bell peppers and brown sugar. You can’t go wrong loading up on this recipe during chilly (chili!) weather!
From All Recipes we found 12 Chili Cook-Off Champion Recipes that were not only tried-and-true but also top-rated and prize-winning. From Boilermaker Tailgate Chili cooked with Guinness beer all day long in the slow cooker, to Deb Doozie’s Blue Ribbon Chili, these recipes have won contest after contest competing with home chefs from all over the country. We’re confident you’ll find a winner to your liking among the dozen recipes here.
Sweet, Spicy and Cocoa Chilis
This chili is a classic from the archives of the Denver Post and while the original recipe uses a pork tenderloin cut into ½-inch cubes plus onion, garlic and brewed coffee (!), this version substitutes three large sweet potatoes for the pork. A little honey, a little cumin and the taste result is both sweet and faintly spicy. And if you want – throw everything in the crockpot for eight hours for an even easier dinner meal!
Food.com’s Chocolate Chili is an interesting take on the mighty, meaty dish with two pounds of lean ground beef, and the usual suspects – pinto beans, green chilies, garlic, onion and tomatoes, plus ½ cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips, 1 teaspoon of cinnamon and a ½ cup of slivered almonds! If you’ve never added cocoa or chocolate to a batch of chili – try it, you might like it!
Vegan and Chicken Chili
The five-star reviews (all 414 of them!) for the Neelys’ White Chicken Chili gave us pause as we searched for the best and the tastiest recipes for chili. This cooking couple combines white beans and some of the ingredients you would expect to find in a chili recipe – white or red: garlic, onion, peppers, cumin and chili powder, with meat from a rotisserie chicken. One secret to this hearty and delicious concoction is mashing half of the beans with a potato masher until they’re chunky. And for toppings, the Neelys stick with sour cream, cilantro and crushed tortilla chips plus a wedge of lime.
Martha Stewart’s Instant Pot Turkey Chili combines one pound of ground dark-meat turkey with lots of the ingredients in chile con carne, but also adds chickpeas and frozen corn. Browning the turkey and aromatics on the “sauté” setting of the Instant Pot before simmering is essential, she says, for depth of flavor in this one-hour chili (35 minutes to prep).
Bean and Bulgur Chili is one of 85 recipes for chili from Taste of Home and uses a combination of beans (kidney, pinto and black), chopped onions, celery and shredded carrots, corn, plus a cup of bulgur – cereal made from wheat that is partially boiled then dried. The combination has great texture and hearty substance, so you won’t miss the meat!
Among the other Taste of Home recipes you’ll find more vegetarian options like the Skillet Chili made with chopped zucchini or the Carrot and Lentil Chili, as well as Cowboy Chili, Enchilada, Steer and Beer, Tex-Mex, Chili Verde, Mushroom, and a number of chicken and turkey chili recipes.
Kitchens for Home Chefs in Colliers Hill!
The kitchens in the master-planned community of Colliers Hill were designed and constructed with the home chef and modern family life in mind. With spacious cabinet and pantry space, and appliances fit for a foodie, see for yourself how designers at KB Home, Richmond American Homes – and coming soon, Boulder Creek – approach kitchen comfort. Priced from the $400s, this fast-growing new home community in Northern Colorado has lots of exciting amenities to offer new home buyers, too!
