Buffalo Chicken Chili

Hello. I am still here. Just toooooo busy to blog.  I've been doing lots of cooking and baking... and knitting and crocheting... but just not finding the time to photograph and post about it all.  I've been finding that, since life has had me so busy lately, I tend to resort to tried and true family favorite recipes to get good, wholesome food on the table.  My recipe experimenting has slowed down a lot but I have been enjoying "souping up" canned soups and making up some tasty soup concoctions for my lunches at work.  Cream of Potato soup was doctored up with canned corn, thyme, sauted onions, and garlic powder for a yummy "Corn Chowder". To use up leftover turkey from Thanksgiving, I made a yummy "Cream of Turkey and Rice" soup with chopped turkey, grated carrot, diced red bell peppers, thyme, and garlic powder, and basmati rice.  Not really blog-worthy recipes, but fun for me to create and it made for easy lunch packing during the week.  I made my yearly Christmas Cookies (German Anise Molasses Cookies) over the Thanksgiving Holiday Weekend.  These cookies deserve a blog post all on their own. I'll write more about that soon... I promise.

For now, I wanted to share this recipe with you.  It's a recipe for Buffalo Chicken Chili; I found this recipe on a blog called www.mybizzykitchen.com.   Here is the recipe LINK.  During my cooking frenzy this weekend, I made up a few pounds of chicken wings for my husband and son, a big pot of soup for my husband for his lunches, a huge garden salad (to keep in the fridge to make dinner preparation go easier this week), and this Buffalo Chicken Chili for me (some for my lunches this week and some to stock the freezer).  You should have seen the amount of fresh produce that went into this cooking frenzy.

I followed the Buffalo Chicken Chili recipe as posted on the link pretty closely with a few exceptions... and they include... added extra carrots and celery for a total of 4 each, added a small zucchini, used 2 eight ounce cans of tomato sauce (I read the recipe wrong and did not buy enough), added 1/2 cup water, I used pre-ground chicken (instead of grinding it myself), and I added a bit of granulated sugar.  I also decreased the chili powder by 1 tablespoon.  Instead of cooking this on the stove top, I cooked this in the Crock Pot (I just cooked the chicken first and then threw all the other raw ingredients directly into the Crock Pot and let it simmer all day long). 

This chili is FANTASTIC.  Funny thing is that if my husband knew it had all these vegetables in it, he would have NEVER tried it... not in a million years.  He was a little skeptical about the recipe since it had CHICKEN in it (he's NOT a big fan... he wants beef, beef, BEEF... not Chicken... BEEF!) My husband and I really think this chili is great.  Sadly, this chili is disappearing so quickly I don't think I'll have any leftovers to put in the freezer.  This recipe was a breeze to assemble since I put all the vegetables (cut into big chunks) into the food processor and just pulsed them all together until they were all finely chopped (as directed in the recipe directions).  I will definitely be making this recipe again.  By the way, as I drove to work today, it was 13 degrees Fahrenheit outside... good chili weather, don't you think?