The Spooky-Season Turkey Chili Recipe You Didn’t Know You Needed
We love chili—who doesn’t? But pumpkin turkey chili? We admit, it does sound a little out there. But I assure you, it's downright delicious. This deceptively healthy and deeply flavorful turkey chili recipe is sure to be a fast favorite. It's definitely one of our family’s favorite fall recipes. Holly's been tweaking and adjusting this particular dish little by little for the past six years and every time she makes it, she falls in love all over again. Ground turkey instead of beef keeps this chili recipe from being too heavy or greasy. Sugar pie pumpkin adds a rich, soul-satisfying element.
The rest of the flavors and ingredients make up what you've come to know and love about chili—big, smoky, bold flavors young and old will appreciate. We especially love serving it alongside our cornbread!
Yeah, It’s Decorative Gourd Season—But We Like To Eat Them, Too.
When we say “pumpkin” in our pumpkin turkey chili recipe, we don’t mean a jack-o-lantern Halloween pumpkin (though those are edible). Although the word “pumpkin” conjurs up a very specific image in most minds—the big, round, almost cartoon-ishly orange gourds that spill out of grocery stores and sit atop hay bails from September 1st through Halloween—it actually is a rather generic word that’s used to refer to many varieties of winter squash that have a bulbous, rounded, usually orange-hued, Halloween-y appearance.
While our favorite variety of pumpkin for cooking and baking—and thus, for using in this turkey pumpkin chili recipe—is the Sugar Pie pumpkin, you can also make a number of easy substitutes if you’re having a hard time finding a Sugar Pie pumpkin. Here are three great alternatives:
- Butternut squash
- Kabocha squash
- Canned pumpkin! While you’ll lose the somewhat chunky texture that cubes of fresh pumpkin or winter squash bring to this chili, canned pumpkin will deliver all of the richly sweet, creamy squash flavor that makes this healthy turkey chili recipe so good. You’ll need about two 14-oz. cans of pumpkin for this chili recipe.
Healthy Turkey Chili with Pumpkin—Let’s Talk Shopping Lists.
One-pot and only 40 minutes from prep to table, makes this dish easily one of the tastiest and simplest you'll make all season. And to make things even easier, we've recently discovered Kroger’s Click List, which has been a major game changer in weekly routines.
Here’s what you’ll need to make this ground turkey chili recipe:
- Vegetable oil
- Onion & garlic
- Bell peppers
- Ground turkey
- Fire-roasted diced tomatoes.
- Sugar pie pumpkins.
- Chicken stock
- Adobo sauce (from a can of Chipotle peppers in adobo sauce—one of our favorite recipe hacks! SO much smoky richness, so little effort.)
- Spices! Namely, cumin, black pepper and salt.
- Black beans.
Wait—What’s Kroger’s Click List, Again?
Click List is a brilliant program created by Kroger to help make your life simpler by doing your chores for you. Okay, so maybe Click List won’t clean your house, or fill your gas tank, but it will take one of the most mundane day-to-day chores off your to-do list. If you haven’t already heard, Kroger’s Click List does your grocery shopping for you. Yep, you heard us right.
Here’s how it works: open the Kroger Click List app and select the participating store in your area, then search from the selection of 40,000 grocery items and products Kroger has available, and the next day you drive to your selected store for pick-up. A friendly employee will bring the groceries out to your car for you. Seriously! You don't even have to get out of the car. Say what?! We like to put on soothing music and grab a coffee to sip while all this is going on and just pretend we're on vacation. It’s the perfect solution for all your busy-person problems, because as therapeutic as grocery shopping can occasionally be, doing it with 1, 2, 3 or really any number of kids just isn't that fun. Neither is having to squeeze it in amidst a hectic schedule or at the end of a long day.
Use Kroger’s Click List and you’ll have more time for snuggling under blankets, and reading books with warm, cozy pumpkin soup—or in this case, chili!—in hand (it's magic that way). The ingredients for this pumpkin turkey chili recipe are going to be the first items in your Click List shopping cart.
This is a sponsored post written by TMP on behalf of Kroger. The opinions and text are all ours.
Tools You’ll Need:
- A large stock pot.
- A sharp knife.
- A sturdy wooden spoon for stirring.
- A ladle.
Pumpkin—It’s What’s For Dinner:
Fall and winter are made so much sunnier by the abundance of squash at stores and farmers markets! Sweetly savory, and loaded with vitamins, eating with the seasons has never tasted so good.
