In my quest to find recipes that make dinner easy on the nights we have “hockey times two,” I’ve been scouring Pinterest for crockpot recipes.  I found one a few months ago that was titled “Crockpot Taco Soup,” and the ingredients looked like they’d be pleasing to my kids, so I gave it a try.  It was okay, but it had a lot of beans.  A lot.  While we all know that beans are good for you or something, I just don’t like them that much.

The next time I made it, I cut the number of beans in half.  It was better, but I still didn’t love it.  Still, it was pretty easy and the kids thought it was great, so I put it in the menu planner.  When I was working on the meal plan for this week, I knew Halloween would be chaotic (we go to my mom’s, since we live in the country and the candy is slim pickin’s out here) and a crockpot recipe would be easiest.  We’d already exhausted my usual suspects in the last week, so I decided to go with the taco soup.

Unfortunately, in my rush to get out the door after running 4.5 miles yesterday morning, I forgot to put the soup together.  Ugh.  I texted my husband later in the afternoon and told him we could do quesadillas or something.  He texted back, “I already put together the dinner that was in the meal plan.” <Cue angel choir>  I knew there was a reason I loved that online meal plan!

Of course, being my husband, he didn’t make it anything like the recipe. 😉  But, as always, his was much better!  He skipped the crockpot altogether (because he didn’t look at the recipe until 2:30pm, lol) and instead made it on the stove.  To his credit, he knew it would need to simmer for a while, and to ensure it cooked evenly on our very hot new stove, he pulled out his grandmother’s old dutch oven (from the 70s, I think, based on the color).

Then, because he couldn’t find the pinto beans, he used great northern instead.  Brilliant!  I realized after tasting his version that it was the pinto beans I didn’t like!  He used one can of each kind of bean, and then (because he doesn’t read well, clearly) he drained the corn instead of dumping it in whole.  Later, when he realized this, he just added hot water until he felt like it was the right consistency for soup.  Personally, I decided a long time ago that this is more like chili than soup, so that’s what we call it now.  But maybe if you followed the original recipe exactly, it might be soup! He ended by adding in some cilantro, and we decided that next time we might add some onion for some more flavor.  But regardless, it was positively delicious and we all enjoyed it.

So, I call this a crockpot recipe, because I know it can be made in a crockpot, but it works just as well as a stove-top version if you want to go that route.  🙂

Crockpot (or Not!) Taco Turkey Chili

adapted from Stephanie O’Dea (not me!)