Almost No Meat Chipotle Sloppy Joes

The finished product. Note the can of chipotle peppers in the background.

Our fridge has been filling up with leftovers from other meals, a bit of tomato sauce, some rice cooked with chicken drippings, sliced tomato, chopped shallots, and chicken breast trimmings. Since we had chicken burgers the other day, we had some of what the grocery store calls “whole wheat” hamburger buns. With all of this, and a little from the pantry, I started making sloppy joes.

I started by frying the bits of chicken breast, shallots, and celery with some black pepper and coriander, then added canned chipotle peppers hoping for a sweet, spicy, and smoky flavour. It smelled amazing, so I added a can of what seem to be mini kidney beans, (the can said “small red beans”). It still smelled amazing, so I tasted what I had so far and my mouth just about caught on fire. I’m not super into spicy food, and 1/2 can of chipotles in maybe 3 cups of food was way too much.

Time to dilute the heat. I added another couple of cans of beans, (this time Romano beans and black beans), chicken stock, tomato paste, and cooked for a bit, then tasted again. While quite hot there was no fire on my tongue so I was happy. I added my rice, more stock, more tomato paste, and the juice of a lime, and some liquid smoke, and pronounced my creation ready.

We toasted the buns and added some BBQ sauce, (you can see the bottle lying sideways in the photo), and the slop, then topped everything off with some caramelized shallots. It tasted good, and cleared the sinuses.

Now for the aftermath. Since I needed to dilute the heat so much I ended up with a huge amount of this stuff, probably two or three litres of it, so I have quite some leftovers, and apparently the rest of the household thinks that it’s too spicy to eat. However, we have a plan: First, we’ll make burritos with it tonight. That way those who aren’t allergic to milk products can add cheese & sour cream to take the edge off. After the burritos we think there will still be leftovers so we’ll use that to start a big pot of chili, and that should taste really good.

Now I just have to figure out what to do with that other 1/2 can of chipotles.

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  • What is Choices That Matter?

    I'm a guy named John, and I do most of the writing around here. I went from a really active lifestyle to a really inactive lifestyle very quickly and my body is noticing. On top of that I'm worried about what's happening to our planet, so, I'm trying to do something about it.

    For Christmas I received the book Food Matters, which I found very interesting and inspired me to start changing. Check out my first post for the beginning of the story.