Spinach and Chickpea Curry

My sister gave me a stash of cooking magazine to look through and this recipe popped out at me. It is the sort of brilliant recipe that is dead simple and super quick to make, but tastes as complex as a time-consuming complicated recipe.

Chunky Chickpea Guacamole

Chickpea guacamole is everything that is good about guacamole, but with an added extra satisfying heft to it. Serve this with chips as a snack or spread this on whole wheat toast (maybe sprinkled with a little crumbled feta) as a light lunch.

The proportions are not set in stone. You can increase the amount of avocado or increase the amount of chickpeas.

Swiss Chard, Chickpea and Tamarind Stew

This recipe, adapted from Ottolenghi’s Plenty, is very much like the Tunisian ragout of Swiss chard and chickpeas called Morshan. The Swiss chard gets meltingly soft and gets infused, along with the chickpeas, with tangy, hearty flavors that are completely unexpected.  Morshan is heavy on the garlic and coriander. Here, coriander is still dominant, but caramelized onion replaces garlic; caraway and tamarind form an intriguing undertone.

The caraway most surprised me because I associate it with rye bread, but it is a spice used in the Middle East. Ottolenghi calls for caraway in a few of his recipes, including his barley risotto (Jerusalem).

 

Morshan (Tunisian Chickpeas and Swiss Chard)

Seeing a recent post about Ottolenghi’s chickpeas and spinach made me think about Paula Wolfert’s recipe for Morshan (Chickpeas and Swiss Chard in the style Tunisian Sahel) (pp. 127-28 of Mediterranean Cooking). The irony was this: I had the baby spinach to make the Ottolenghi recipe, but I had just cooked the Swiss chard that I bought a day or so ago. But now I wanted to make the Morshan. So, I used the baby spinach instead of the Swiss chard.

And it was delicious.

Israeli Spinach Chickpea Salad with Feta, Olives, and Preserved Lemons

This was an improvised main dish salad.