A prepared cook cooks well: Pasta with chickpeas and lemon

And a good day to Annalena's army!  Today, we're gong to mobilize, with two, and maybe 3 dishes.  Forewarned is forearmed, my stalwarts:  they dishes will increase in difficulty, as we go along.  We'll be starting with this vegetarian pasta dish, which could easily become a vegan dish.  Then, we will move to a classic:  beef and barley soup, and end with a stuffed whole fish which is made on Persian New Year, which just happened last week.

What does Annalena mean by "a prepared cook?"  Well, in this instance, she is writing of something so easy, yet so difficult:  planning your ingredients, or as is more traditional  "stocking the pantry."  Now, for those of us who grew up with the idea that the "pantry" was where you kept things like rice, flour, sugar, etc, this is no big deal:  these "staples" kept.  Today,  the "pantry" has been expanded to include fresh food: things that can spoil.  And this is where we have our problems, ragazzi.  Let us have a show of hands:  how many of you have had thoughts along the lines of  "Oh, I meant to cook it, but I forgot it was there," before you throw away the broccoli that has gone to compost in your fridge, or the unidentified package of something, that smells, and so forth?   Annalena is guilty of this, and tries, to some extent , to avoid it  So she keeps things in her fridge that she knows she and the Guyman will always eat.  Or that she can cook into "something."  Chickpeas are one of those things.  You can put them in your pantry in canned form, but the fresh cooked ones are better.  They really are.  So Annalena cooks chickpeas every week.  If she doesn't use them, she freezes them.  Or, she finds a new use for them.  Such is this pasta.  And as with many of Annalena's dishes, we are going to discus ways along the path of making this good, satisfying plate of food, that push us to vegan.  And if you are gluten free, use a gluten free pasta.   Let's begin.

You don't need Annalena to teach you how to cook chickpeas (do you?).  So we start with 2 cups of cooked chickpeas, stored under their cooking liquid

Annalena has drained the liquid from the chickpeas.  We'll come back to that.  So you have those legumes: put them in a bowl, and do a rough mash:  break up half of them or so, but not all:

When chickpeas break up, they give off a starch.  You can see a little of this here.  We're going to exploit this later on. 

Now, because chickpeas are sort of bland tasting, we need our "aromatics."  We have garlic, onions, and rosemary here:

You can vary the quantity of rosemary, but stick to four smashed cloves of garlic, and a small onion, of any color, chopped roughly.   Next:

Anyone wanna guess how much olive oil that is?  It's 1/4 cup:  four tablepoons.  Let that warm up, an then, put in the garlic.  Cook it until it gets a nice golden brown:

All you are doing here is flavoring your oil, so after they're browned, scoop them out, and add the onions and the rosemary.  Cook this until you see the onion soften:

While this is happening,   your home will redole with the smell of the rosemary.  It's a good thing.   Now, we add the chickpea mash, AND... remember we separated out that liquid?

We're going to use 2-3 cups of this.  If by some chance you did not follow Annalena, and used canned chickpeas, VERGOGNA  (look it up), but use either water, or stock of some kind instead.  You add the chickpeas and the liquid to the onion/rosemary mix:

Raise the heat  and boil this down until the liquid is gone. 

And now, you will see this is a dry sauce, and it will stay so.  Chickpeas and their starch pick up liquid as they sit.  For now, add a tablespoon of butter ( which takes us out of vegan land), or olive oil ( which does not), and also grate the peel of half a lemon into this.  

You can let this sit for several hours, but know you will be adding pasta water to this.  If you have no problem , then you're good. 

When you are ready to cook, boil up about half a pound of pasta.  If you are a vegan, you know to read the label to make sure that the pasta does not contain eggs.  Many of the dry pastas do not.  If you are gluten intolerant, you know to make sure that there is no gluten in that pasta.  And you all know how to cook pasta.  As a general rule:  take the time on the label and knock off two minutes, for dry pasta.  For fresh, do what they say. 

For this dish, use a short, shape rather than a long thin one.  

If your pasta sauce is dry, add a spoon or two (or three) of the water from the pasta as it cooks.  Then, toss the cooked pasta into the sauce, turn it to distribute well and, if you are NOT going vegan,  sprinkle the dish with parmesan cheese.  If you ARE going vegan, Annalena suggests a good slug of peppery olive oil, and maybe some chopped parsley:

Annalena made her sauce at about 3pm, and made the pasta at 11.  So this can be done.  And you should make this, even if you're only cooking for you.  You can  save the remnants of sauce and use them for somethng else.  And you can feel very good about yourself for making something tasty, economical, and low on the food chain.  - something we will not be doing in the recipes to follow. 

More to come ragazzi.  For now, go make lunch

The art of soup: coconut curry sweet potato soup

Well, ragazzi, to say Annalena has  been somewhat uninvolved with her blog and  the internet in general, would be an understatement.  And she offers no explanations here.  Instead, in response to several of you, she is posting her recipe, for the above named soup.  And in the course of the recipe, she will give you different options  and directions in which to take this soup, which is delicious in the TWO ways she made it.  And a warning aforehand:  this recipe makes a LOT of soup. Annalena got 3.5 quarts out of it.  It is worth it.  It is vegan.  It is cheap.  And it is good.

Sweet potatoes, to Annalena, are one of the forgotten vegetables of the fall and winter.  Indeed, Annalena forgot about them.  The soup resulted from a realization that she had tons of these guys sitting around, doing nothing.  They keep well, so there wasn't a storage problem, but there they were, sitting there, quietly, doing nothing.  But soup needed to be made.  Just a couple more weeks before the Guyman ends his musical rehearsals for the season, and Monday soup making will go on hiatus.  so, what better than?

We will need 3.5 pounds of sweet potatoes:

Annalena's sweet potatoes are organic, and they are local, so they are smaller than what you will find in a supermarket, where a  sweet potato can easily weigh nearly 2 pounds.  That is why you see so many of the sweets here.  Do weigh them.  As Annalena has noted, you are going to have a lot of soup, and while you can play with the ingredients, proportions are important.   Now please put those aside while we get to work with the other ingredients. 

What you see here, is a pound of roughly chopped onion (it was one HUGE onion), and two chunked green peppers.  So far, Annalena does not give you leave to change the recipe.    You will need these, and 3 tablespoons of vegetable oil.  You are also going to need about 4 cloves of garlic, and two tablespoons of roughly chopped ginger:

And here we take our first fork in the road:  if you do not like ginger, or you do not like it very much, cut back on it, or leave it out completely.  Annalena is a big fan of ginger, so she used plenty.  You can replace this with, for example, curry powder, or perhaps chipotle sauce or chili peppers if you like.  You do want the garlic. 

Have all of this ready,  and then, in a BIG pot,  heat the oil, and add the onions and the peppers at the same time.  When you are getting some serious feedback from the hot oil, lower the heat, stir the stuff every now and then, for about ten minutes.  Give it that full ten minutes, and keep it moving every few of those ten.  You want something like this:

While the onions and peppers are cooking, you should peel, and chop your sweet potatoes roughly.  You have plenty of time to do this while the basic veggies are cooking, and that is a good thing, because once they cook, you are going to be moving pretty fast for a few minutes. 

When the veggies have softened (and by the way, add salt along the way), add two tablespoons , of red curry paste. 

And here we come to another fork in the road, ragazzi.  If you do not have red curry, or you know you do not like it, or you don't want curry, don't use it.  Use something you like:  this is YOUR soup.  But if you use the curry paste, cook it for about two minutes.  Then add the ginger and onions  and cook for about a minute:  when you smell the ginger, you've cooked it enough.  

Now add your sweet potatoes:

And really, it's easy street now.  You stir these together with the aromatic vegetables, and then add two quarts of your preferred liquid.   Annalena used water.  You can use vegetable stock, you can use chicken stock, you can use what you like.  NO COCONUT MILK YET.  Coconut milk will "break" if you cook it for too long, so no, not yet.  Add the liquid, taste for salt and correct, and then let this simmer, for about 15-20 minutes.  You want to test the potatoes, to see that they are soft.

And now, we come to another fork, ragazzi.  This one is simple:  if you do not want to puree the soup,  or if you just want something chunky, leave it as it is.  But if you want to take it to creamy, let this cool a bit, and then add a 16 ounce can, of low fat coconut milk (There is no need to use the full fat stuff here).  Stir it around , and puree it, and you get the soup at the top of this blog post. Or, as Annalena did, puree some and leave some chunky and you'll have two very different soups.

And now... yet another fork in the road. The original recipe calls for lime juice, fresh.  Annalena loves lime juice, just not in her soup. You could also add shoyu.  Or.. as Annalena plans to do, some seafood.  She'll be using crabmeat to finish it off.  But don't feel compelled to do it.

Annalena got 3.5 quarts of soup out of this, so please keep this in mind.  She has not tested it for its ability to freeze, but in view of her good nature, she shared it.  And you should too, especialy if you go completely vegan on it, which is easy to do.

So ragazzi,  please make this soup. Enjoy it.  Tell Annalena if you varied it, and how you liked it.  And please keep in touch.  It may not be clear, but Annalena misses you.