Thick and Hearty Vegetable Chili

With the temperature dropping this week, this is the kind of recipe that starts coming out of the drawer again. Mrs. Joseph Wagler passed it along, and she says the first cool evening of Fall is the signal in her kitchen. Out come the soup pots, and this chili is usually the first thing to fill one. It is a meatless chili, thick with beans and vegetables, and she says nobody at her table has ever missed the beef. What she likes about it is how much of it comes straight from the garden and the cellar. The onion, the pepper, the carrot, the celery, and the tomatoes are all still coming in this time of year, and the beans are whatever she has canned or has on the shelf. It comes together in a single pot in well under an hour, and it is one of those dishes that tastes better the second day, so she makes it in a big batch and sends the rest to the lunch pails. A pan of cornbread alongside and a warm kitchen on a cool night, she says, and that is about all a person needs.

Recipe by Scott