Chili Nachos

"The crunchy chips, the gooey cheese... Sometimes, we've just gotta have a nacho fix. 

Luckily, when we want to indulge our nacho cravings, we don't have to resort to gulping down insane amounts of calories and fat grams." 

Appetizers

INGREDIENTS:

DIRECTIONS:

First thing's first: Chop up your bell pepper and about half a large onion. You should have about equal amounts of onion and pepper.

Brown your beef in a little olive or canola oil with your onions, green pepper, and garlic.

While that's browning, open all your cans of everything. Chop up a couple of the Chipotle (I rinsed them first, a little less slippery to work with), and a handful of the jalapenos.

Once your meat is cooked, add the cans of tomatoes, the can of chili beans and the chopped peppers. Make about 1 1/2 cups of beef stock with the base mix in hot water, and add that for a yummy beefy flavor. Add a good amount of cumin, chili powder, the bay leaf, and a little bit of oregano.


Now, just let it simmer for as long as you want. This mixture is intentionally a little thin to begin with, more like a soup. I simmer it without the lid and it reduces down and concentrates nicely. I cooked this batch for about an hour and a half because I like the veggies to still be firm and a little chunky. Add some frozen corn in the last 20 minutes or so of cooking. Mine looked like this:

I don't like a whole lot of topping on my nachos, especially when chili is one of them. I keep it simple, with just some finely chopped onion and a little more chopped jalapeno.

You, of course, might want to add sour cream, guacamole, black olives, salsa, etc.

Spread a good layer of chips out on your plate, and top with good ladles of chili. Top with some chopped onion and jalapeno, then load on the cheese.

Ideally, you'd stick this under the broiler or salamander right now. But since mine is 2 stories above me and I'm lazy, I just nuked mine.
 

Serves: 6