Recipe: Basic chick pea soup

Today’s post brings you my culinary discovery of the month. I’ve been trying lots of new recipes lately, as I now eat a hot lunch every day at the University canteen. The food there is… well, canteen food. It’s neither particularly healthy nor particularly satisfying, but it is a full meal and so I’ve been adapting my home cooking to really simple things involving lots of vegetables and small dishes.

Soups fit the bill quite well, and this week brought along a fantastic option that makes a great base for different variations. The basic recipe, if you can call it that (original here), involves just five ingredients: canned chickpeas, onion, olive oil, salt, and pepper. Really. I also threw in a bit of vegetable stock to give it a bit more flavour (chicken stock works too). This is one of the best make-ahead dishes ever: prepare it on a Sunday and enjoy it during the week in different shapes or forms. One day, chuck in some pimientos del piquillo. Another day, just add the juice of half a lemon. I bet, even though I haven’t tried it yet, spinach would work brilliantly too. This is an amazing option to keep in the fridge for those days you come home late after exercise or a long day at work and just need something really satisfying really fast.

Ingredients (2 portions)

• 1/2 onion, chopped
• 2 cans of chickpeas
• olive oil
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1 stock cube (optional)

Heat some olive oil in a pot and sautée the onion with some salt over low heat until translucent, about 20 minutes. Drain and rinse the chickpeas, add them to the pot and add water until the chickpeas are just about covered. Bring to the boil and simmer on low heat for about 1 hour. Add pepper and some more salt (if necessary) to taste. If you’re adding a stock cube, you can either do this when you add the water, or as I did, when I reheated the soup just before having it.

Recipe: Moroccan Lemon and Yoghurt Soup

Do you ever get that thing where you suddenly notice something – a word, a song, a book – and all of a sudden, it’s everywhere? I’ve had that a lot learning languages. You’ve never seen a particular word, but all of a sudden you need to know what it means and don’t know how you could ever live without knowing it, because wherever you look, that word pops up. Well, this can also happen with food. Chickpeas, for instance. I knew they existed somewhere alongside me in this universe and that you could make some pretty amazing stuff with them – hummus, for example – but I’d never cooked with them until quite recently. And bam, out of the blue, recipes involving chickpeas are everywhere. I don’t seem to be able to get away from them. Chickpeas are the new black, or something like that.

This soup is just one example. It’s amazingly quick to make and one of the most summery soups after gazpacho. In fact, it’s ideal when you want summer, but the seasons don’t quite play along: this soup is refreshing and warming at the same time.

Ingredients (2 portions):

• 1 small onion
• 1 courgette (2 if you can get very small ones)
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• salt
• 600ml vegetable or chicken stock
• 2 threads of saffron or 1 good pinch of ground turmeric
• 150g chickpeas (canned), drained
• 200g natural yoghurt (I used whole milk, but you can also use the kind with 1.5% fat)
• juice of 1 lemon
• 1 egg
• some mint leaves

Cut the onion into fine rings and the courgette into 1cm thick slices. Mince the garlic. Sauté the onion and garlic in olive oil together with the cumin. Add a bit of salt. Add the stock, saffron, chickpeas, and courgette. Bring to the boil, cover, and let simmer at low heat during 10 minutes.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the yoghurt, lemon juice, and egg. Take the soup off the heat and slowly stir the yoghurt-lemon-egg mixture into the soup. Season to taste and sprinkle generously with mint leaves. Enjoy!

Recipe: Catalan Chickpeas with Almonds

In my eternal quest to find dishes that will keep me fed happily for several days a week, while tasting good at the same time, I happened across this recipe from the now sadly defunct blog The Traveller’s Lunch Box (Melissa, could you please come back and do some more of your delicious food-writing?). Knowing I’d be home late several times last week, I was looking for the sort of food that gets better the longer it sits in the fridge. And boy, did this do the job.

I made it on Monday and ate it on Tuesday, and then again on Thursday. When I first finished cooking on Monday and tasted it, I was more than slightly underwhelmed. It was OK, but sort of bland and not half as tangy as I’d expected it to be, given that the juice of half a very juicy lemon had gone into it. But by the time I got home on Tuesday, it had marinated in the fridge for about 24 hours and in the meantime, some sort of transformation process had taken place. My previously not-so-exciting chickpeas with tomato sauce were suddenly fresh, garlicky, and springy. Let’s not lie, I wanted to bathe in them. So make it, let it sit, and have it for dinner the next day or take it into the office for lunch. Best thing? You can have it hot or cold. This, I think, will become a summer favourite.

Ingredients (2 portions for the very hungry, up to 4 if you serve it as a starter or main course with bread)

• 400g chickpeas (from a can)
• 1 can of chopped tomatoes
• garlic (the original recipe uses 3 cloves, I used one very big one – next time I’d go for two)
• pinch of sugar
• 1 onion
• 2 handfuls almonds, peeled (if you’re really lazy you can buy ground ones but I peeled and chopped them myself)
• 1 small handful smooth parsley
• saffron (a few strands or a pinch of the ground variety)
• juice of 1/2 lemon
• 300ml vegetable stock

Try your chickpeas and cook them al dente in salt water if they’re not completely done. Dice the onion and mince the garlic. In a large, heavy frying pan with some olive oil, cook them at low heat until they’re absolutely super tender. Add the tomatoes and the sugar, turn up the heat a little, and let them fry for about 15 minutes until they’re reduced to a very thick paste (from The Traveller’s Lunch Box, I learned that this is called a “sofregit” and is frequently used in Catalan cuisine. Given the Catalan obsession with tomatoes, I can totally see this).

While the sofregit is frying away, you deal with the almonds, parsley, and saffron. In the ideal case, you have a mortar and/or a food processor. Just throw them all in and pound or pulse them into a thick paste with the help of some water. If you’re me, you have neither – this dish brought me to the long overdue decision that the next purchase for my kitchen will be one of these handheld blender-cum-whipping devices – and will need to do some serious chopping. I also recommend making this dish if you’re feeling aggressive; just envision your worst enemy. I placed it all on a cutting board and chopped away until it was reasonably mashed. The almond pieces were probably much larger in my version than what they should be, but I actually liked that a lot. It was crunchy.

Poor the chickpeas, stock, and almond mix into the pan with the tomato sauce. Let it cook for about 10 to 15 minutes, until the sauce is nice and thick. Add the lemon juice and season to taste. Let it cool down and stick it in the fridge overnight. Eat it the next day and marvel at the flavours that will spread in your mouth.

If you like it on the more strongly flavoured side, you could probably add a dried chilli to your sofregit and add some tomato puree. I loved it as it was.