Chickpeas? Yes, please!
Budget-friendly, healthy and delicious
When your pantry’s looking bare, you’ll lose your despair if you at least find a can of chickpeas there. With this budget-friendly pulse (the edible seed of a legume) in hand, you’ll have a key ingredient to anchor all sorts of creations.
To show you what I mean, today I present recipes using canned chickpeas.
One is peanut hummus, a tasty twist on the Middle Eastern dip that’s rich with chickpeas.
To give it a peanutty taste, instead of using tahini (sesame-seed paste), the hummus is instead flavoured with a little peanut butter, peanut oil and a garnish of chopped, roasted peanuts. It makes a nice appetizer to serve with bread, crackers or pita bread. It could also be a side dish for grilled meats, such as chicken or lamb kebabs.
Next on my what-can-you-do-with-list is a simple soup, deliciously flavoured Indian-style.
To make it, onion, ginger and garlic are sautéed until tender and then stimulatingly flavoured with Madras-style curry paste. In go some chickpeas, diced potato and stock, and you simmer away until the potatoes are tender. You then purée and end up with a pleasingly smooth, very tasty soup that you top with a dollop of tangy yogurt and crunchy almonds. Serve with warm naan bread for lunch or a light dinner.
From soup, we move on to a salad strewn with chickpeas. To make it, canned chickpeas are added to a Greek salad-like mixture. When ready to serve, the salad is spooned over lettuce and decorated with bits of feta cheese. This salad would make a nice meal served with focaccia bread and perhaps a glass of Greek wine.
My last chickpea recipe is a vegetarian, North African-style stew from my bestselling book Everyone Can Cook Slow Cooker Meals. It’s one of my favourites dishes in that tome and contains a lively mix of flavours, such as lemon, apricots, cumin and cayenne. Serve the stew over couscous to create a nice fall supper.
When eating chickpeas, the health-nut side of you will be pleased to know they are an excellent source of protein and fibre and contain all sorts of other things, such as potassium, calcium, niacin and vitamin B6. Another bonus of chickpeas is that, unlike beans, they have a lower oligosaccharide content, which in turn makes them easier to digest and less likely to cause flatulence.
Just so you know, one 19-ounce (540 mL) can of chickpeas, when drained, will yield about 13/4 cups (425 mL). If you wanted to replace those canned chickpeas with dried chickpeas, you would need to presoak, cook and replace them with 2/3 cup (160 mL) of them.