Vegan MoFo day 14 - sharing some chilli verde with a non-vegan

I had planned to do something really clever today and veganise a chocolate prune torte that a friend of mine had been aiming to make allergen free. But, after a very busy weekend, I just couldn't find time or energy to make the delicious cake I had been dreaming up.

So, instead, I've got something I made recently and shared with my favourite non-vegan, Mr Flicking the Vs.

Mr FtVs is a veggie, but because I do most of the cooking in our house, he's been subjected to both the best and worst vegan recipes I make. He's also the poor sod that gets sent out to find the single weird ingredient that a dish needs ("go on, there must be barberries in south London somewhere") and also has now built up an encyclopaedic knowledge of all the places in London where you can get quality vegan cake with a one-mile radius. From Camden to Catford, he can tell you where sponge and icing lurks.

Here's one of the more successful recipes I cooked up for him - chilli verde.

I'd never heard of, let alone tried, chilli verde until I bought some fresh tomatillos on a whim. Before buying that fateful box, I'd only tried tinned tomatillos, and always made green pumpkin seed mole from Veganomicon with them.

But with a box of freshies in my hand, I hit my preferred internet search engine to work out what to do with them. The answer, it turned out, was vegan chilli verde. In the original, it's Tex-Mex pork stew in tomatillos; in my version, the tomatillo sauce is still there, but the protein punch comes from beans and tofu for a cruelty-free chilli. It may be thoroughly inauthentic, but it tasted good.

Vegan chilli verde

Ingredients

One white onion, finely diced

One stick celery, thinly sliced

One green chilli, finely diced

One tablespoon cumin seeds, dry roasted until fragrant, then ground
One teaspoon dried oregano
One dessertspoon flour

250g fresh tomatillos, roasted at 200C until blackened
One box of marinated tofu pieces eg Cauldron's
One tin of butter beans, drained
Vegetable stock

How you do it
Sweat the onion, chilli, and celery in oil until soft.
In the meantime, puree the blackened tomatillos with a little stock to make a puree.
Add the oregano and cumin powder to the onion mixture, and cook for a minute.
Add the flour and cook for a further minute, stirring to prevent it burning.
Add the tomatillo puree and stir until combined, diluting a little with more stock until you have a thick sauce.
Add in the tofu and butter beans, adding more stock a little at a time, until everything is covered with a thick sauce.
Leave to cook for five or ten minutes, and serve with tortillas.