RO*TEL Chili Challenge

We’ve been eating a lot of chili lately, for three reasons: One, it’s delicious. Two, it’s very easy to make – my cooking repitoire is small at the moment since I’m limited in how long I can stand in the kitchen for. Three, it’s an exceedingly frugal meal! For those reasons, chili is a total winner in our house.

Recently, I mentioned on Twitter that I was whipping up a big batch of chili in the slow cooker. @Ro_tel Tweeted at me and asked what recipe I was using, which started a conversation about favorite ways to prepare chili. They asked if I’d like to try using RO*TEL in my next batch of chili and offered to send me a package with a can of their Zesty Original Tomato and Green Chili Sauce & some recipes to try out. Challenge accepted, RO*TEL! 🙂

The packaged arrived yesterday, so I decided to whip another batch of crockpot chili, this time using RO*TEL. Here’s the ingredients I assembled:

2 Turkey patties
1 pot of beans
Bag of frozen onions
Frozen tomato juice
1 can RO*TEL Zesty Original Tomato and Green Chili Sauce
Garlic salt
Pepper
Mossy Bayou hot sauce
Taco bell hot sauce packets
Pizza Hut chili pepper flakes

Every part of this chili was frugal in some way. Here’s the breakdown:

The frozen tomato juice that you see pictured above was from a can of diced tomatoes that I got at the dollar store – in our area at the moment, canned tomatoes are cheaper than fresh. I was making a simple pasta tossed with tomatoes, olive oil, and Parmesan, so I didn’t need the juice, but I didn’t want to waste it; so, I strained it into a bag and froze it for chili!

These turkey patties were on sale with a coupon recently, and I thought they’d be a great frugal addition to bulk up meals. Instead of serving them as burgers, I grilled them on our trusty George Foreman Grill and chopped them up into small pieces.

We cooked 2 bags of pinto beans from Dollar Tree in a large stockpot, and after adding what I needed to the chili, I had enough left over to freeze two bags worth for future meals.

The frozen onions came from a deal I got last year where I bought 17 pounds of onions for a little over $4. Jai chopped and froze all of them and we’ve been using them in meals ever since.

To start the chili, I layered the frozen tomato juice, frozen onions, chopped turkey, and beans in the crockpot. Then I added the free sample can of RO*TEL sauce plus 1 can worth of water, the Mossy Bayou hot sauce (That I won in a giveaway!), garlic salt & black pepper (Both from the Dollar Tree), hot sauce packets from Taco Bell, and chili flakes from Pizza Hut. Now, to clarify, I’m not one of those people who steals packets from fast food restaurants! 😉 But every time I buy one taco from Taco Bell’s drive-thru, they hand me about 30 packets of sauce. Pizza Hut usually gives us a ton of chili flakes and parmesan as well, so I save all these extra condiments and use them to cook with!

I also added a splash of whiskey to the chili on the spur of the moment, since I’ve heard that it adds a nice flavor to chili. Whiskey isn’t exactly frugal, but it was an extremely cheap bottle. 😉

I then set the crockpot for high and left it to cook. I let all the ingredients thaw as they cooked, and stirred occasionally to ensure that they were mixed thoroughly. I let this cook for about 3 hours – when it was getting close to being ready, I started some white rice in the rice cooker to serve with it. Here’s the finished product:

So, what’s the verdict? Delicious!! Because of the ingredients which I used, this chili had a soupier texture, which was perfect over rice. Also, although it was fully cooked, the onions were a little crunchy – which I thought was good, but if you want them more tender, I’d cook it another hour or two. The reason I served it after 3 hours is simply because we were hungry and impatient! 😀 This is a pretty spicy chili because of all the hot sauces and chili flakes that I added – you could tweak the ingredients to be more or less spicy to your taste.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to get seconds!