The Aldi Sweet Harvest tinned mixed beans in water are a great ingredient to use in making chilli con carne. I find that a tin of kidney beans is too many kidney beans in the one dish, so have mostly stopped using those. Instead I cook chilli con carne using baked beans, or mixed beans, which give a greater variety of beans, but you still get some red kidney beans which add a bit of “colour”.
There’s no added salt and the whole can contains about 250 calories – a tin of Aldi baked beans in tomato sauce has about 400 calories and, as they say, “every little helps”, so it’s a lower calorie option rather than using baked beans. These Sweet Harvest tinned mixed beans cost about 42p/tin.
The beans in this tin of mixed beans are: black beans, haricot beans, pinto beans, chickpeas, red kidney beans and aduki beans – so that’s six varieties! That certainly makes for a more interesting chilli con carne in my book!
I also use these mixed beans to make a simple vegetarian chilli using just a tin of mixed beans (drained of the water), a small chopped onion and a couple of grated carrots, with 2 teaspoons of chilli powder. Mix that lot up in a slow cooker and cook on high for 1 hour, then low for about 4 hours and you’ve an easy, quick meal!
Update June 2019:
I went looking to buy a couple of cans of Aldi Sweet Harvest mixed beans, but they weren’t on the shelves. I checked the shelf labels, in case they were just absent/out of stock, but there wasn’t even a label for them! I do hope they’ve not stopped selling these mixed beans as they did add variety to my chilli con carne recipes and became my “go to tin of beans” for variety purposes.
Lidl are selling mixed beans – they had two varieties, mixed beans in water and another one in a spicy sauce with the label calling them Taco Mixed Beans. These were priced at 49p today (June 2019). In the end though, this time, I bought the red kidney beans as they were just 32p and, as I’ll be mixing them with baked beans and chick peas for my next slow cooker chilli I figured I’d just have to live with a lot of red kidney beans in the dish 🙂