Easy vegan crockpot chili

Hey guys! I hope everyone is having an amazing day today. A few days ago I was driving back with Brandon from a friends house. I was thinking out loud about what I wanted to make for dinner later that night like I always do #foodonmymindalways. I spontaneously thought about a big bowl of delicious homemade chili. I knew that we had a ton of leftover fresh veggies from the week before so I decided to go to work looking for some veggie heavy recipes. I came across a bunch of different Vegan recipes and decided to do what I always do with cooking... think "hell yeah I can make that sh*t". I have never been one to easily follow recipes, I like to just take a few different items from different recipes that sound good and hope for the best. I mean how bad can a freaking recipe turn out right? Well, sometimes it does turn out bad. I mean like ew, brandon smiling and saying "its good" while I can obviously see his face says otherwise! Hehe

Well to my effing surprise this recipe turned out bomb as sh*t. Like eat the next day for lunch and dinner good. I also put the leftovers in little mugs and froze them, plopped them into a ziplock bag after they had froze so I now have dinner for a lazy night. I think I'm getting the hang of this cooking thing.

Anyways, here's the recipe that I ended up with. I mashed 3 or 4 different recipe ingredients along with some random stuff I had laying around and BOOM out came this chili.

Ingredients:
• 1/2 cup chopped carrots
• 1/2 to a whole bell pepper
• 1 chopped red onion
• 2 chopped zucchinis
• 1 cup frozen or fresh corn
• 1 to 2 Tbsp chopped garlic ( One can of tomatoes that I got had garlic inside so I used only 1) 
• 3 (14.5oz) cans of chopped fire roasted tomatos
• 4 (15 oz) cans of beans of your choice ( I used pinto, white kidney, red kidney and garbanzo beans)
• Juice of half of one can of the beans ( I used the red kidney beans juice)
• 3 Tbsp tomato paste
• 1 Tbsp chopped chipote peppers in adobo sauce
• 2 cups of vegetable broth ( one can go directly into crockpot the other will be used to get flavor out of the pan)
• 1/3 cup of Couscous 
• 1 tsp of Trader Joe's maple agave syrup blend ( can also use honey or brown sugar)
• 1 Tbsp Coconut oil
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 Tbsp oregano ( I only had an italian blend of oregano and thyme)
• 1 Tbsp chili powder
• 2 Tbsp cumin
• Pinch of salt
• Pinch of black ground pepper

Step 1

Heat the Tbsp of coconut oil into a medium sized skillet. Once hot put all of the veggies into the skillet and sauté until the vegetables begin to soften. Once they have softened, move them directly into the crockpot. Take one cup of your vegetable broth and pour into the pan. Let the broth come to a low boil making sure to mix and scrape any of the vegetable pieces that were left behind. Transfer the broth into the crockpot making sure that you have gotten all of the delicious veggie pieces from the pan as well.

Step 2

Add all of the ingredient to the crockpot  EXCEPT the couscous and give a good mixing. Make sure that all of the spices are evenly divided around the crockpot. Turn your crockpot onto high and cook for 3 to 4 hours. Taste throughout to make sure its turning out delicious! Okay fine you don't have to but I did and yummmmmmmm

Step 3

Five minutes before you are ready to turn off your crockpot pour the couscous in and stir around.

Step 4

Divide into your bowls and load on the toppings if you please.

Some ideas for toppings are:

-Cheese ( I know this would not make it vegan anymore but I just love cheese, you could totally add vegan melting cheese to this though)
-Avocado
-Low fat plan greek yogurt
-Green onions
-Cilantro
The options really are endless and all of them are freaking delicious. I hope you like it and don't forget that this freezes really well for a later time.