Three-Bean Turkey Chili

This is another post of some of my old recipes, from November 3, 2011. I still cannot find my charger for my camera and there are a ton of more recent pictures on there. Alas.

So, I love making chili in the crock pot because it's basically what it was designed to do -- I mean, you can cook anything in a crock pot, but soups, stews, and chilies definitely come out the best. This Three-Bean Turkey Chili is from the Crock Pot Slow Cooker Best-Loved Recipes cookbook. This might actually be the first recipe I'm posting from there! The cookbook is good, but there are definitely some overlaps with the Crock Pot Incredibly Easy Recipes cookbook.

This is amazingly easy. Basically, you brown ground turkey and chopped onion on the stove and then put it into the crock pot after draining off the fat. Then you add everything else: diced tomatoes, chickpeas, kidney beans, black beans, tomato sauce, diced green chilies, and chili powder. What makes this super easy, is that all those ingredients are canned, leaving only the ground turkey and onion for the cook to prepare. Anyway,  you stir everything together, then cook it on high for 6 to 8 hours.

This is what it looked like before turning it on.

This is what it looked like when it was finished cooking.

You definitely want to stir the chili when it's done before serving.

Now, while the chili was cooking, I made cornbread from a Trader Joe's mix and I ended up serving the chili with cornbread and a salad. Great meal. Of course, the cornbread doubles the amount of calories in the meal, but it was so yummy! I wrote in my cookbook that this was a "really good, solid chili" and to "serve with cornbread."

So the recipe says that it makes 6 to 8 servings. For 8 servings, then, the calorie count for the chili alone is 285. Since a serving of the cornbread is 290 calories, that makes the total, including salad, about 725 calories. Not bad. For 6 servings, you have 380 calories for the chili alone and 820 for the whole meal. Without the cornbread, this is pretty low-calorie chili.

I chose to make this because I already had black beans, chickpeas, ground turkey, and chili powder on hand. Thus, for 8 servings I would have only paid $1.09 per serving, and that includes the cornbread! For 6 servings it's not much more: $1.45 per serving. Of course, if you had to get everything, it'd be $2.52 per serving for 8 servings and $3.35 per serving for 6. (Without the cornbread, it'd be $2.18 per serving for 8 servings and $2.91 per serving for 6.) Of course, and I can't believe that I haven't said this on the blog yet, but YMMV depending on what part of the country you live in -- food could be more or less expensive there. Regardless, with this chili you can have a nice, healthy meal for less than $5 per serving!