The simplest recipe for vegan chilli! Turn the stove on and get ready for delicious hearty chilli to make nachos, spoon over rice, or wrap in a burrito.
Sunday night fever
I do love an easy Sunday night at home.
First, I get ready for the week with to-do lists. Second, I wash it all away with a steamy hot shower. Third, I wrap myself in a blanket like a mummy and melt in the sofa. Fourth, I grab food from the coffee table like a Roman emperor.
This habit helps me enjoy a moment of calm and shake off the early Monday blues.
My go-to comfort food recipe is a sweet potato chilli that I greedily eat with tortilla chips, cheese, and guacamole on Sunday night. I then pack the leftovers with rice or wraps for a Monday office lunch.
Riccardo normally dices all the veggies while I try not to eat all the tortilla chips before dinner.
The power of habits
Do you also have habits that make you feel happy? Habits help you to learn or unlearn things.
In the 60s, a famous study by Dr Maltz highlighted that we need a minimum of 21 days to form or break a habit.
However, as in a broken telephone game, people transformed the word ‘minimum’ into ‘only’. Very quickly, rumours said we need only 21 days to turn around our lives. What better advice than the one we hope to hear? Changing our lives is quick and easy.
In 2009, the University College of London did new research and found out that habit transformation depends on individuals and can take from 18 to 254 days.
As soon as I heard that, I started wondering where I am on the spectrum – so far I feel like I am on the long bumpy road one…254 days to go! What about you?
Habits everywhere for everything
Habits have become such popular topic in the self-help literature. Have you read Atomic Habits? Or The power of habits? Or Habits of a happy brain? Or Mini Habits? Or Making habits breaking habits? What about high-performance habits? Or even The 7 habits of highly effective people?
The list is infinite, I shall stop there.
While I am still confused on which habit book to pick first and find this topic a lucrative business, I believe a good habit is the way to bring change into our life. Do things only once won’t lead us far.
Habits can also help us achieve goals. Dan Brown says ‘don’t trust yourself, trust the process’ when teaching how to write.
You might laugh at this, but I tried this on me, and it works 100%. This blog is the product of habits. The results are still work in progress, but for sure dedicating to the blog an hour a day is helping me persistently cultivate what I love.
Mental Health Day
Today is the 10th of October, and it is not just a Sunday and the perfect time for my vegan chilli. Today is also world mental health day.
The mental health debate is complex and often feared as it is still (wrongly) discriminatory.
The mental health debate can’t also be dealt with in just one blog post or by giving habits as the solution to everything.
But for me, habits are a lifeline.
Breaking down things into tiny steps helps me manage the day more easily.
Repeating things slowly in my own time, help me build up strength.
And, what if today even that tiny step is too much? Take your time, hold on but don’t lose hope. Choosing the habit of loving yourself is one you won’t regret.
Vegan Chilli con Sweet Potatoes
Course: MainsDifficulty: Easy15
minutes25
minutesThe simplest recipe for vegan chilli! Turn the stove on and get ready for delicious hearty chilli to make nachos, spoon over rice, or wrap in a burrito.
Ingredients
- Chilli
300 g dried red kidney beans (600 g when cooked)
500 g sweet potatoes
1 tsp ground cayenne pepper
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground paprika
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp chilli flakes
4 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
1 onion
1 carrot
1 garlic
2 red peppers
500 ml peeled plum tomatoes
500 ml tomato sauce
Juice of a 1/2 lemon
- Nachos
150 g tortilla chips
50 g cheddar cheese
50 g guacamole
20 g sour cream
Method
- Dice the sweet potatoes and boil them in salty water (use half a spoon of sea salt) for 8 minutes. Make sure to not overcook the sweet potato. The cubes should still hold their shapes and you should not completely pass them through when you pierce them with a fork. This is very important otherwise you’ll have a mush instead of a chilli.
- Finely chop the carrots, onion, and garlic. You can also use a food processor to speed things up.
- Fry them with all the spices with lots of oil for 5 minutes.
- Dice the peppers and add them in, stir for 2 minutes.
- Add the plum tomatoes, the tomato sauce, and beans let it simmer for 10 – 15 minutes
- Add the sweet potatoes, let it simmer for 5 minutes
- Nachos
- Take a baking tray (oven) or a plate (microwave): make a layer of tortilla chips, add four-five spoons of chilli, sprinkle over cheddar cheese, close off with another layer of tortilla chips until you feel like it – yum, yum, yum
- Grill the delicious nachos in the oven for 5 minutes at 180 C or in the microwave for 2 minutes at 900 C – this might vary depending on your equipment.
Notes
- You can also enjoy chilli with rice or wrapped in a warm tortilla
