Last night we made Chili Pie for dinner. Since it was bleak and rainy all day, chili pie seemed like just the thing. I got inspiration from the current Real Simple magazine. I would link to the recipe but they only open the site to customers or AOL members. I basically used the recipe as a guide and didn’t do every last thing but it was supercalifragilistic good.
Here’s what you need:
A 12oz pack of chicken sausage in the mild italian flavor, take the casings off
2 15 oz cans of beans–we used 1 can of kidney and 1 can of black bean
1 tablespoon of chili powder
1 box of Jiffy Corn Bread mix (you need 1 egg and 1/3 cup of milk to mix)
1 cup of shredded cheese (I used an italian blend)
1/2 cup hot salsa (I used Mrs. Renfro’s Green Hot Salsa)
Preheat your oven to 400 and you should use a skillet that can go from stove top to oven.
I took the sausage (there are 4 in a 12 oz pack) out of their casings and then chopped. The better-half manned the skillet and crumbled the pieces up. If you have fat that needs to be drained, drain away. Then we added the chili powder and stirred like mad for about a minute until incorporated. Then we added in the beans and salsa and boiled for about 5 minutes. Meanwhile, I mixed up the corn bread and added the cheese to the bowl.
We removed the skillet from the heat and realized there was no way that skillet was going to hold the chili and the corn bread, so we got out another, and much larger, pan and dumped the chili into that pan and then put the corn bread on top–spreading it out to cover as much surface area as possible.
Then it went into the oven for 15 minutes. We checked it and the corn bread didn’t seem brown enough so it went in for another 4 minutes and then we broiled for a minute or two to make sure the bread was a wonderful tan color.
We sautéed spinach and garlic as a side dish. You could get out the sour cream for the chili but it didn’t really need anything. The bread soaked up most of the liquid and the ingredients worked very well together. It was pretty spicy and I suppose you could use a milder salsa if you have issues with spicy.