Frugal Living – Moroccan White Bean Turkey Chili

This is a Pampered Chef Deep Covered Baker Recipe.  I bought my large covered baker about 4 years ago and have since bought a smaller one also.  I love them.  The baker was a budget buster but I’ve tried a lot of recipes in this book and in the “Season’s Best” cookbooks that come out and they’ve all been great.  Many of the recipes are microwave recipes, although you’d never know to taste. 

I made a few modifications to the original recipe.  The recipe called for fresh onion and garlic but I used frozen pre-chopped onions (I mean, why wouldn’t you) and minced garlic out of a jar – the kind you get in the condiment aisle.  Since Ore Ida started selling frozen onions, I don’t even remember the last time I chopped a raw one.  I know the most budget friendly approach is to buy food its most basic and unprocessed state but sometimes convenience wins at our house.   Here is my modified recipe: 

Ingredients:
1 lb lean ground turkey
1 jalapeno pepper
1 medium green bell pepper
1/4 cup frozen Ore Ida chopped onion
3 tbsp Pampered Chef Moroccan Rub
1 tbsp minced garlic
½ tsp sea salt
1 can each great northern beans or navy beans (rinsed and drained)
1 can tomato sauce
1 can diced tomatoes with garlic and onion (undrained)

STEP 1. Coarsely chop jalapeno and bell pepper.  Combine onion, peppers, turkey, rub, garlic and salt in the Deep Covered Baker.  Microwave covered on high 5-7 minutes or until no longer pink, breaking in to crumbles halfway through. 

STEP 2.  Carefully remove baker from microwave using oven mitts.  Add the canned stuff & mix well.  Cover and microwave on high for 14-17 minutes.  Voila!

I made a batch of this tonight and left out the jalapeno since I was making food for a family I don’t know very well.  It still had a nice flavor but I like some heat to my food.  I’d consider trying two jalapenos in the future.  One is nice and zippy. 

My turkey was frozen tonight, so it took about 12 minutes for step 1 in our microwave.  I stirred every four minutes. 

I don’t have the Pampered Chef Moroccan Rub, so I made up my own using chili powder, cumin, ginger, cinnamon and sugar.  I am not a measurer and did the “pinch of this/pinch of that” method.  You can play around with the flavors you like. 

I have made this a couple of times before tonight and have used different beans…I’ve used a mixture of pinto beans and navy beans before and I think you could use garbanzo beans with a good result.  With so much of this recipe being in cans, this is a good thing to throw together with what you have on hand. 

This is a hearty, inexpensive meal and it’s got enough of an exotic flavor to be a little bit trendy.  The serving suggestion in my recipe book said to stir in some raisins and dried apricots.  The total cost of the ingredients to make this recipe was under $7.00 – I’d guestimate this as yielding eight meal sized servings.   I’m not counting the spices, the onion and the garlic because those are pantry staples for us.  Most of the time I have the canned ingredients on hand, too, so really, on any given shopping day, I’d just have to buy some turkey and a couple of fresh peppers!

I made two batches of this tonight while doing other things around the house…one batch for a family in my work community that had a new baby and one for us.  I made our batch spicy and it is in the freezer now.  This will yield least two full meals for my family.  I started cooking at about 6:15 and I was done with both batches and walked out of a clean kitchen at about 8:45.  During this time I cooked our dinner (we had something else besides this chili tonight), made a batch of lemon bars, ate dinner with my family, gave Zack a bath and put him in bed…there were a couple of times the dish sat in the microwave waiting on me to stir/go to the next step, but it was all good - very, very easy.   

Leave a comment if you try this and like it - or if you try this and hate it!