Easy Five-Vegetable Chili Recipe

What I love about chili is that it's so simple and so versatile in the sense it's a pretty hard dish to mess up. You can pretty much throw whatever you want in a pot and if it comes out as something that resembles chili, then it basically is chili. I've followed so many chili recipes in the past and tweaked around here and there to the point where now, I've pretty much developed a recipe that I can call my own. My recipes are based off of whatever I can find in the house, and since many of the vegetables have been recently used up and I can only scrounge up five types of vegetables from the fridge...then Five-Vegetable Chili it is.

Note: I tend to avoid salt and in turn, I go a little crazy on the spices, but I toned it down for the purpose of this recipe. It's a rough estimate of what I think is a decent ratio, but feel free to add more or less to taste.

Ingredients:

• 1 red onion
• 1 bell pepper
• 2 large tomatoes
• 1 celery stalk
• 1 15-oz can of kidney beans
• 2 tbsp chili powder
• 1 tbsp granulated garlic
• 1/2 tbsp cumin
• 1/2 tbsp cayenne pepper
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• 1/2 cup water
• Extra virgin olive oil

Directions:

1. Finely chop up the onion, celery, tomatoes, and bell pepper.
2. Drain and rinse the kidney beans.
3. Heat up the extra virgin olive oil in a pot. When it is hot, add the chopped onions. Add in the chili powder, cumin, cayenne pepper, and granulated garlic. Sauté until onions are tender.
4. Add in the water. Bring the flame down to a medium low. Add the celery, tomatoes, bell pepper, and lemon juice, and simmer for 10 minutes.
5. Add the kidney beans and simmer for another 10 minutes. Make sure to stir the chili from time to time. Serve and enjoy.