Cheesy Sausage Chili

Most mornings we snooze the alarm a lot.  But not this morning.  At least not for me.  Instead of snuggling down further into the covers, I pulled myself out of bed and headed for the kitchen to start the crock-pot.  As I dumped the ingredients into the crock-pot I tried really hard to be quiet so that my husband could continue our usual routine of sneaking a few minutes of sleep in between rounds of the alarm going off.  I was finished with that and onto getting ready for the gym when my husband got out of the shower and decided that the house smelled bad.  You have to understand that I am very attached to my cooking and quite good at cooking so it is kind of shocking for me to have someone say it smells bad.  I tried hard to brush the comment off and go on with my day, secretly hoping that he would eat his words later.

Sure enough, when I came home from work, the house smelled wonderful and my husband (who gets home from work before I do) had already snuck a taste of it and proclaimed it very good!  Apparently it just smelled like cold chili and cheese this morning and he doesn't find that too pleasant.  But once it gets going it smells awesome and tastes so good.

So here it is!  My new chili recipe inspired from a recipe I saw on the Official Crock-Pot website.

Cheesy Sausage Chili
1lb pre-cooked sausage links
1 can spicy Rotel
2 15 oz cans kidney beans
2 15.25 cans corn
1 24 oz can petite-cut stewed tomatoes
1 packet taco seasoning
1 tsp chipotle pepper paste (I used peppers that are canned with Adobo sauce and blended in the food processor)
1 c heavy cream
1 lb shredded cheddar cheese

This is so easy.  Simply slice the sausage and place it in the crock-pot along with the Rotel, beans, corn, tomatoes, and taco seasoning.  Warm the heavy cream on the stove until it is bubbling.  Be sure to stir it so that it will not burn.  Add the cheese to the cream, a little at a time.  Make sure to stir constantly so that the cheese will melt into the cream (this is a little trick to get out of using processed cheese products).  Once the cheese is melted into the cream, add the mixture to the crock-pot.  Stir the ingredients together and turn the crock-pot on low for 8 hours.

After your crock pot has done it's magic, it will look like this:

And this is magical.  As my husband says, crock-pots do wonders with sausage making it very plump and juicy.  And the cheese mixture melds with the tomatoes into the amazing broth/sauce.  This is so good it is worth my husband saying it smelled bad this morning....