Sometimes how you feel after you eat is almost as important as how you feel while you eat, and few foods give me as pleasant of a post-meal feeling as beans do. I'll feel full, but not lethargic. In fact, I'll feel quite energetic and weirdly healthy, as if the beans are absorbing all traces of toxins in my body. However, despite how I feel after a bean-based dish, it's sometimes hard to motivate myself to eat a bean-based dish. Beans can often be bland. They are a pain to cook. They often absorb my best attempts at flavor.

Yet, there does exist an excellent bean delivery system which also sits gracefully at the intersection of taste, convenience, and price, and that system is defined by one short, sweet, word: chili. Now, even up where I live I get the Food Network, so I do understand the stance of purists out there who define chili merely and strictly as a combination of meat, tomatoes, spices, and nothing else, but I defend my use of the term threefold:

1. Nobody seems to have come up with an alternate term for chili with things other than just meat, tomatoes, and spices, especially one as short and evocative as "chili".
2. The classic "Chili con Carne" base is great if you're judging or participating in an actual chili cookoff, but the rest of us are less interested in the competitive viability as mush as we're interested in tasty dinner.
3. To overlook this combination of spices and methods as a wonderful way to cook beans is to deny oneself an otherwise wholly tasty experience, one far grander than the experience gained from a strict chili definition.

In the end, professional chili cooks, consider your term co-opted. If Vermonters can get over what people elsewhere will call maple syrup, then I think those partial to classic chili con carne will survive the utter indignity of people who add beans to it.

On the subject of beans, what better method for cooking beans exist than the ol' crocker itself? The basic design of the modern slow cooker is derived from electric beanpots of the 1960s, and while I have yet to make chili from dried beans, the slow, gentle heat allows all of the flavors in the pot to meld together.

As for what to put in the chili, in a way it's more art than science. Most chili recipes are flexible enough that once you have your basic flavors and seasoning down, you have a fair amount of freedom over exactly what else you want to put in the pot. This is why, rather than just a single chili recipe, I've broken mine down into parts to mix and match, a sort of chilimprovisation, if you will.

Here we go, with any luck this will make sense as we go. In a standard medium-sized slow cooker, add

• One medium onion, diced or sliced thin.
• Two medium cloves garlic, diced or sliced thin.
• 1 teaspoon salt.
• 1 tablespoon chili powder.
• 1/4 cup packed brown sugar.

All my chilis start out this way. Now for a meat-based chili, I add the following:

• Two pounds 85% lean ground beef, browned and crumbled, drained of fat.
• One pound sweet italian sausage meat, browned, and crumbled or diced small, drained of fat.
• One can beef broth.
• Two 15-ounce cans black beans, drained and rinsed.
• One 15-ounce can red kidney beans, drained and rinsed.

Now, using two different kinds of meat add depth of flavor and texture. You can use pretty much any combination of ground meat that you'd like, as long as it adds up to about three pounds, and has a little fat content to it. Meats above 90% lean tend to toughen over the long cooking time, though I haven't tried ground turkey, yet, which may hold up fine. The beans can be treated the same way, as in any combination that adds up to three 15-ounce cans. Also, though I used dried beans in other recipes, I've yet to use them in chili.

If I was cooking a vegetarian chili, instead of above, I would add:

• 1/2 cup bulgur wheat.
• One can vegetable broth.
• Four 15-ounce cans black beans, drained and rinsed.
• Two 15-ounce cans red kidney beans, drained and rinsed.

Essentially, I'm replacing the meat with extra beans. The bulgur wheat was a nice tip I picked up from Jeanne Lemlin's Vegetarian Classics, which helps replace the lost texture and mouth-feel from not having the meat in the chili.

After that, it's time for tomatoes. You can either go with:

• One 28-ounce can of diced or petite diced tomatoes, drained.

Or:

• One 15-ounce can of diced tomatoes, drained.
• One 15-ounce can of petite diced tomatoes with green chilis, drained.

Or any 28 ounce combination of diced, petite diced, fresh, or otherwise prepared tomatoes, drained. After that, it's time for the heat. I prefer my chilis to not be painfully hot but rather a slow, building heat. To that goal, I typically use:

• One diced fresh jalapeno pepper, seeds removed.
• Two diced dried chipotle peppers, seeds removed. (Kitchen scissors work best, here.)

Removing the seeds lessens the heat, but the real reason to remove them is, well, they're somewhat untasty. If you want more heat, just add another jalapeno, or switch to habeneros or Scotch bonnets. Alternatively, if you want more heat, you can wait until near the end of cooking to add the peppers, as slow cooking does seem to mellow the peppers somewhat. If you can't find regular dried chipotles, you can use the ones packed in adobo sauce (they seem to be a popular ingredient these days), but I find that the adobo flavor disappears while cooking. If you want less heat, use less peppers or also remove the ribs. If possible, wear gloves when working with hot peppers, as their juice seems to stick on you hands worse than garlic does, and can be painful if you get the juice in your eyes somehow.

Finally, we're ready to cook. Give the ingredients a good stir and cook on low about 8 hours or on high about 4 hours. It's slow cooking, so you don't have to be extremely accurate, but if you're cooking on high, don't go over about 4 1/2 hours or so. During this time, feel free to go about your day.

After the 8 hours on low or 4 hours on high, it's time to finish the chili off with the rest of the ingredients that don't survive slow cooking too well. Working as quickly as you can, open the lid and add:

• One green bell pepper, diced.
• One fresh tomato, diced.
• Two teaspoons ground cumin.
• One tablespoon chili powder.

Stir these ingredients in and let the chili cook an extra hour on low or an extra 30 minutes on high. At this point, you can add other ground spices as you see fit. Lately, I've also thrown in two tablespoons of ground chipotle pepper for some extra smoky flavor.

And there you have it. Chili is easy, tasty, and inexpensive. The most expensive component of the recipe is the meat, practically every other item is dirt cheap. The leftovers seem to last about a week in the refrigerator, and one full pot of chili made on Sunday can provide decent-sized lunch portions from Monday to Thursday. The only additional serving suggestion I have is to serve with diced or shredded cheddar or Monterey jack cheese and a cold beer.