Holy Mole! Chocolate Peanut Butter Tempeh Sweet Potato Chili!

We lost a good friend this morning, so I felt some comfort food was an appropriate meal choice. I pulled out the crock pot and made a batch of Sweet Potato Chili. The great thing about this recipe is that it's really easy and super cheap. I think you can make a double batch of this for less than $20 and the leftovers will last all week. Since we've moved into the new house with Karen, a lot of our ingredients are doubled up. One of those ingredient redundancies was peanut butter, so I emptied out some chunky peanut butter into the mix (it was at least a cup's worth). When we were camping in Maine a few weeks ago, we visited a Mexican restaurant in Portland that made an awesome Chili Relleno featuring an amazing Mole sauce. This inspired me to add some unsweetened chocolate into the mix (probably about 3-4 tablespoons). This was a pretty risky choice for comfort food, but I had a feeling that it would all turn out nicely combined with the sweet potatoes. Oh and one more thing, I normally add vegan ground beef to my chili, but we didn't have any, so I  substituted Tempeh instead. The earthiness of the Tempeh, Mushrooms (subbed for red peppers) Cumin and Peanut Butter combined with the Sweet Potatoes and Chocolate really went well together. Turned out to be the best Chili yet. Karen made a Taco Salad to go along with fresh veggies delivered to our door today from the folks at Ottawa Food Box. Here's a pic of the meal:

The Exciting Life I Lead...

Krista's working tonight, so today's post will give you an idea of the exciting life I live as a bachelor... After discovering this awesome youtube video, I started to get hungry:

So I decided to make some veggie dogs. I didn't feel like going the classic route with regular yellow mustard and ketchup, so I made Mexican Veggie Dogs! Pretty much it's just Daiya Cheese, Tofutti Sour Supreme and Salsa. I guess now, I'll clean up a bit and then later on watch the Jays game. Yet another exciting day...

And here's a pic of my meal:

Yeah, that's right, I ate four of these!

Beet Feast

Last night, Krista and I had dinner with our future roommate Karen and we had quite the feast! We made Beet Risotto with Rapini (we substituted veggie stock and omitted the cheese), Roasted Yellow Beet Salad with Warm Maple Mustard Dressing (you'll see in the pics that we didn't have yellow beets...) and Karen made a spicy Mexican soup with white beans (sorry recipe not available for this one). And it was washed down with beer and a refreshing melon and white wine cocktail. Again I don't have the recipe for this drink, but it was included with Karen's weekly fruit and veggie delivery from the Ottawa Good Food Box. Karen just started receiving the deliveries a couple weeks ago and we've been really inspired to create recipes based on the food they send us and so far the results have been pretty good! Anyways, here are some pics from our meal last night. By the way, sorry that I'm too lazy to add them in chronological order...

Halfway Done Risotto

Dinner's Served!

Steaming Roasted Beets

Karen's serving Krista some spicy Mexican soup

Tempeh for the salad