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Eat at Joe's: Chili for chilly
Why do our appetites change when the weather gets cooler? Plus: A recipe for Chickpea Chili Verde and a tribute to my brother, Michael, who died recently.
Joe Yonan
September 07, 2025
Chickpea Chili Verde. See recipe below!
When it’s chilly,
there’s chili
Last week, I spent several hours sitting on our back terrace enjoying the cool breeze. On one such occasion, as I was loving the fact that the nights (and even some of the days!) are whispering of fall, long before they usually do this time of year, I was spooning into a bowl of Chickpea Chili Verde (recipe below), and I couldn’t stop hoping to find an etymological connection between the words “chili” (or “chile”) and “chilly.” You word nerds feel me.
Alas, the terms are unrelated. “Chili/chile” comes from the Nahuatl word for the plants of the genus capsicum, the hot peppers as we think of them. “Chilly” is of course a form of “chill,” which derives from the Old English term “ciele” and the proto-Germanic word “kal,” meaning to be cold. But they intersect in my kitchen — and perhaps in yours, too — when you make the former because you feel the latter.
Chili sticks to your ribs, as goes a saying that you don’t want to think about too hard because it has a pretty horrific (and thankfully biologically nonsensical) literal meaning. But why are stews the type of thing we want to eat as the weather cools?
It’s science, people!
Here’s how it works:
When we’re cold, our bodies reflexively look for ways to warm up. One is by shivering: It generates energy and therefore heat. So does eating, in a process called diet-induced thermogenesis. Many studies have shown an inverse relationship between the outdoor temperature and the intensity of our appetite. Scientists have even pinpointed the neurons in mice that are connected to this cold-induced appetite increase.
We also lose serotonin when sunlight levels decrease as the days shorten, and that causes hunger to spike and satiety levels to drop.
So that explains why we want to eat more. But why do we want to eat different dishes than in the warmer months? There’s some evidence that the same drop in serotonin leads us to seek out high-carb foods. At the extreme, one study compared diets for people who work in frigid temperatures, looking for which would best help prevent hypothermia, and found that the worst is a high-protein one, because, among other things, it reduces cold tolerance. (Mount Everest hikers — anyone, anyone? — should leave your protein bars at home and pack some bagels.)
Back to chili. Is there a better food to warm you up when you’ve got the shivers?
Speaking of hiking, I remember many years ago going on one of my first daylong, serious hikes, up Mount Washington in New Hampshire. It was right around this time of year, and while the temperature was in the 60s at the base — just perfect, really — by the time we got to the Appalachian Mountain Club hut where we would spend the night, it had dropped into the 40s, with a fierce wind. One of our group had separated from us and gotten lost, and he happened to be the one dressed the skimpiest who didn’t pack layers of clothing. By the time he arrived, two hours after the rest of us, he was blue and shivering. The rest of us huddled around him as the AMC volunteers brought hot chocolate and blankets, and then … chili.
When you’ve been hiking all day and are cold to the bone, well, this was the most delicious chili any of us had ever tasted. That’s coming from a Texas boy who grew up with very strong opinions about the dish. And here’s the kicker: It was vegetarian! (By the way, those AMC volunteers — called the “Croo” — participate in an incredibly complex system to get food to those huts, which are accessible only by foot or helicopter.)
This taste of the most comforting, nourishing chili I could have imagined was the first crack in my hard, purist insistence that the only real chili is Texas chili, and that Texas chili has no beans or tomatoes, just chiles, beef and seasonings (see my tribute to my brother, below). But maybe one of the reasons the AMC chili was vegetarian was because they knew that the tired, cold hikers didn’t need a big bowl of protein; we needed complex carbs, and beans are the rock stars of that category.
As luck — or Mother Nature — would have it, the weather has since warmed, and yesterday it got up to 91 degrees in Washington. Was I itching to eat some of the leftover Chickpea Chili Verde hanging out in the fridge? Not as much as I was last week. But this morning it’s drizzling, I see lows in the 50s in the forecast, and I can feel my chili cravings returning.
I break for animals:
Moon the Husky
Recipe: Chickpea Chili Verde
I first started making a smoky version of this chili from Gena Hamshaw’s “Food52 Vegan” using black beans and sweet potatoes. I have since swapped in and out many other combinations, including kidney beans and chickpeas, plantains and mushrooms, depending on what I have a taste for, turning this into more of a blueprint than a set-in-stone recipe. The key elements are beans, a starchy or “meaty” ingredient, canned tomatoes (or tomatillos), and generous spices. This is one of the five variations I published in “Mastering the Art of Plant-Based Cooking.” For more variations, scroll to the bottom of the recipe.
Makes 6 cups (4 to 6 servings)
Storage: Refrigerate for up to 1 week or freeze for up to 3 months.
12 ounces (340g) tomatillos, husked and rinsed
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 large yellow onion, chopped
4 garlic cloves, chopped
1 to 2 jalapeño or serrano peppers, seeded if desired and chopped
2 teaspoons ground cumin
½ teaspoon Spanish smoked paprika (pimentón)
1 teaspoon fine salt, plus more to taste
1½ pounds (680g) Yukon gold potatoes, scrubbed but not peeled, cut into ¾-inch/2cm cubes
2 (15-ounce/425g) cans no-salt-added chickpeas, drained and rinsed
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice, plus more to taste
½ cup (18g) lightly packed fresh cilantro leaves (or parsley for the cilantro haters), chopped
2 large avocados, sliced
3 scallions, thinly sliced
In a large soup pot or Dutch oven over medium-high heat, combine the tomatillos with enough water to cover by at least 1 inch. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat until the liquid is simmering, and cook the tomatillos until they are tender (and an olive drab color). Saving 1 cup of the cooking water, drain the tomatillos and transfer them to a bowl. Use a potato masher or large fork to crush them.
In the same pot, heat the oil over medium-high heat until it shimmers. Add the onion and garlic and cook until lightly browned, 8 to 10 minutes. Stir in the jalapeños, cumin, smoked paprika, and salt and cook just until fragrant, about 30 seconds.
Stir in the potatoes until well coated. Add the chickpeas and the 1 cup water from cooking the tomatillos and bring the mixture to a boil. Reduce the heat to low, cover, and cook until the flavors meld and the potatoes are very soft, 15 to 20 minutes. Stir in the crushed tomatillos, cover, and cook until the flavors meld, 5 minutes.
Stir in the lime juice and cilantro. Taste and add more salt and/or lime juice if needed.
Divide among serving bowls and top with the avocado and scallions.
Variations
Black Bean–Sweet Potato Chili: 2 to 3 canned chipotle peppers in adobo sauce (depending on how spicy you want it), finely chopped, instead of the jalapeño or serrano peppers + sweet potatoes instead of the Yukon golds + 1 (15-ounce/425g) can diced tomatoes, preferably fire-roasted, instead of the tomatillos + black beans instead of the chickpeas.
Kidney Bean–Plantain Chili: Chipotles + ripe plantains (yellow with plenty of black spots, cut into ½-inch/1.3cm slices and then in half crosswise to form half-moons) instead of the potatoes + diced tomatoes instead of the tomatillos + red kidney beans instead of the chickpeas.
Adzuki-Mushroom Chili: Chipotles + sliced cremini mushrooms instead of the potatoes + diced tomatoes instead of the tomatillos + adzuki beans instead of the chickpeas.
White Bean–Squash Chili Verde: Jalapeños or serranos + peeled and seeded butternut squash instead of the potatoes + cannellini or navy beans instead of the chickpeas.
Recipe from “Mastering the Art of Plant-Based Cooking” (Ten Speed Press, 2024). Copyright Joe Yonan.
More favorite vegetarian chili recipes
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RIP, Michael Yonan
Michael Yonan, right, sings “If Ever I Would Leave You” from “Camelot” to our mother, as a friend looks on, in 2016.
My purism around Texas chili came straight from one very insistent source: my brother, Michael, who was 10 years older than I am. He died recently, in an emergency room in Galveston, Texas, where he had been taken from a nursing home. Michael was a complicated man, and we had a complicated relationship, which makes my grief … complicated. As memories that go back decades swirl like a tornado in my mind, I’m trying to fling some of the more negative ones off like so much debris and hoping the dust can settle around the positives.
Michael possessed one of the sharpest intellects I’ve ever come across. As a former statistics and finance professor, he could dive in and analyze a situation like no one else. Honestly, I probably owe him my ability to retire early, because I don’t think I was out of my teenage years before he gave me one of his intensive, funny, obsessive lectures — this one about the power of compound interest. (Save early and often, people.)
Underneath a sometimes-intimidating crust, buried under many layers of a sometimes-infuriating, always-heartbreaking, usually-twisted way of thinking about so many things, was a soft and sweet core. One of my fondest memories of him was from my sister Bonny’s hospital bed, where she was dying of brain cancer decades ago. All six of her siblings were there, including Michael, who was closer to her than any of us (they affectionately called one another “hag” — “sea hag” for Bonny, who lived on the Gulf Coast of Texas, and “snow hag” for Michael, who lived in the upper Midwest at the time). A lifelong fan of the musical “Camelot,” Michael broke out into his favorite song, “If Ever I Would Leave You,” and tears rolled down six faces as his gentle baritone nudged its way into our hearts. (It was the same song that three of us sang outside his door in Ballinger, Texas, many years later in a futile attempt to convince him to talk to us, but that’s another story.) To this day, I can’t listen to more than a few bars of the song without weeping.
Michael was also such a food lover. Long before Yelp or even Chowhound made this easier, he would enjoy nothing more than getting in his car and scoping out West (and East, and Central, and South) Texas barbecue spots, keeping notes on the best places to go for brisket, sausage, and more. He got into smoking his own brisket, too, enlisting our stepfather’s help in doing the most Texas of Texas things: cutting a big oil barrel in half lengthwise, adding hinges, handles, legs and grates — and maybe an offset box — and turning it into a smoker.
It was Michael who taught me how to talk to people about chili. And by people, I mean non-Texans. When some New Englander brags about their “special chili recipe,” he told me when I was living in Boston, I should ask them a series of questions. “What kind of beans do you use?” Unless the answer was, “Beans don’t belong in chili,” the only response was to make that wrong-answer-buzzer noise. Same with, “What kind of tomatoes do you use?” He delighted in these trick-a-Yankee questions.
Several years ago, I worked with Michael to publish a recipe for his version of a Texas bowl o’ red. And later, when I was working on “Cool Beans,” I decided to update it in accordance with my new diet (and my cookbook’s mission). I took everything about the traditional Texas recipe — using just meat, chiles, and seasonings — and merely replaced the beef with beans, cooking them for almost an hour in a pressure cooker to get them to almost completely break down in the liquid. I loved it, and still do.
To be honest, by the time I published “Cool Beans,” Michael and I weren’t in regular touch. I won’t go into the reasons, at least not now, but I bring it up because I’m not sure if he ever made this version, so I can’t say whether it passed muster with him. He did keep up with my career, though, so he might have at least noticed that I earned a vote of Lone Star confidence when the recipe was published by none other than that standard-bearer of the state’s culinary traditions (they even have a barbecue editor!): Texas Monthly.
Clearly, I’ve loosened up on the chili purism. There’s Texas chili, and there’s everything else — and everything else deserves to call itself chili, too.
Chili contains multitudes. My brother did, too.
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