DuClaw For Pete’s Sake Vegetarian Chili

Thank you DuClaw Brewing for sponsoring this post and sending me the DuClaw For Pete’s Sake Porter. All opinions and the vegetarian chili recipe are my own.

Welcome to the November edition of “Cooking with Beer”! Each month DuClaw Brewing sends me a beer and a friend and I create a recipe. It’s a fun time to think outside the box and try a new beer and new food. This month’s beer is “For Pete’s Sake Porter”, an Imperial Chocolate Peanut Butter Porter. In other words, this an Imperial version of Sweet Baby Jesus (one of my favorite of DuClaw’s beers).

This is my second time getting this beer and I absolutely love it. If I were given a choice, I would not cook with this beer. I would just sit and enjoy a bottle all by itself. But alas, DuClaw sends me the beer so that I can create recipes, not so I can tie one on with Santa. So, cook I did. Last year, my friend and I had a cookoff – I made chocolate cookies with peanut butter chips and he made peanut butter cookies with chocolate chips. They were both amazing! Given last year’s recipe and my recent DuClaw pecan pie recipe, I decided I needed to do something savory. What’s better than dessert on a cold winter’s day? (OK, nothing really.) Chili!

We eat a lot of chili around here in the winter. It’s cheap, it’s easy, and everyone in the family likes it. My usual recipe never tastes the same twice because I don’t measure and I regularly change up which beans and what meat (if any) I use. Similarly, this recipe could be tweaked in any number of ways depending on what you have in the house. The one thing you will need though is something a bit sweet to balance the beer. (I used chocolate!) Also, I did this on the stove top, but it would definitely work in a slow cooker.