Last Week’s Dinner: Chickpea Soup with Parsley and Parmesan

 

You know how a week can get away from you?

I don’t remember making this last week. I don’t remember what night it was supposed to be dinner. I know it was made last week, because I just asked The Wife. She also does not remember on what night it was prepared. There is a leftover quart of it in the freezer and I’m looking forward to enjoying it again with a crusty hunk of Italian bread, as opposed to whenever it was that I made it and whatever it was that accompanied it.

Here’s what I do remember:

WHAT WORKED: The chickpeas. When mashed with a wooden spoon, they make for a thick, stick-to-your-innards soup. Oh, at the end I tossed in a handful of spinach leaves for fun. They add a nice extra vitamin punch and color to the soup.

WHAT DIDN’T: The chickpeas. When mashed with the wooden spoon, the skins fall off and make for an annoyance.

WHAT DID THE WIFE SAY: “The skins were annoying.”

WILL IT MAKE ANOTHER APPEARANCE: Yes, though with another type of bean.

Chickpea Soup with Parsley and Parmesan
From MarthaStewart.com

2 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for drizzling
5 cloves garlic, very thinly sliced (about 2 tablespoons)
Pinch of red-pepper flakes
Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper
2 cans (about 15 ounces each) chickpeas, drained and rinsed
1 qt. chicken vegetable broth
1 cup water
Coarsely chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley leaves, for serving
Finely shredded Parmesan cheese, for serving
Toasts or bread, for serving

Heat oil in a medium pot over medium heat. Add garlic and red-pepper flakes; season with salt and pepper. Cook until oil is infused and garlic is just beginning to color (do not let brown), 2 to 3 minutes. Transfer garlic chips to a plate.

Add chickpeas to oil in pot, increase heat to medium-high, and cook until heated through and creamy, about 5 minutes. Smash some of the chickpeas with a potato masher or the back of a wooden spoon. Add broth and water; simmer until thickened slightly, about 10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.

Divide soup among 4 bowls. Top with parsley, Parmesan, and garlic chips. Drizzle with oil and serve immediately with toasts.

Meatless Tuesday: Roasted Tomato Pasta + Chickpeas

The dill is dead.

No, I haven’t been playing Abbey Road backwards. The dill really is dead. This is a surprise to me as usually my cilantro goes to pot very early and the dill fights for garden domination with the thyme. This year, the cilantro has gone to for, the thyme is explosive and the dill is dead.

This fact didn’t occur to me until I was ready to cut herbs tonight before dinner. As previously mentioned, I had already forgotten to roast the tomatoes for tonight’s dinner; a feat which I completed on Monday night. Instead of dill, I went with thyme. Yes, it’s a completely different flavor than dill, but it was a safe choice as it complemented every other ingredient in the recipe nicely.

Meatless Monday: Tomato-chickpea soup with Swiss chard and rice

Very rarely does soup come together in less than an hour. One of the great things about a soup is that it sits on the stove, simmering and reducing itself into super-concentrated flavor from meat or veggies in the pot. I was a little skeptical at the recipe for tonight’s offering from Serious Eats, as it promised a total work time of 40 minutes.

But when you read the instructions, the only flavors that need to meld are the garlic, onions, stock and the tomatoes, which receive plenty of time to work together in the beginning. The chickpeas don’t offer much in the way of flavor, adding starch, bulk and protein instead. The Swiss chard absorbs the flavor from the broth. The key here is salt and making sure you use plenty of it. Sea salt probably works best here since you can season without the added sodium (sort of the “tastes great, less filling” argument).

Meatless Monday: Roasted tomato, garbanzo and chard soup

The Italians love their soup. At least the Italian-Americans do. As a child, there was one shelf in our pantry that devoted to cans of soup. The basement freezer that kept the meat cold also held an endless supply of frozen soup.

Meatless Monday during the winter typically brings a combination of pasta and veggies and soup, more often than not it’s the latter. Time becomes a problem here, as the best soups often take more than an hour to prepare, which is often impossible on a Monday evening. A soup like this can start on Sunday and finish on Monday, as the tomatoes can be roasted separately without compromising the flavor of the soup.

Grocery List: November 11, 2012

We’re back to regular programming here at Al Dente. Last week’s illness did not require me to be quarantined in an infectious disease clinic. When I finally broke down on Wednesday and went to the doctor (in fairness, after waffling on whether I was going to see the doctor, my co-worker and lunch partner Toni jammed her phone in my hand and said, “Call now.”), I was told that I had a chest cold. After one puff on a magic inhaler, I was apparently much clearer when she listened to me on her stethoscope.

My visit also led to the discovery of a new painkiller. Well, new to me anyways. My doc saw me get up from the exam table rather gingerly and asked what was wrong. I explained my current symptoms. She checked me out and gave me tramadol. It’s not a narcotic, but it’s certainly a lot better than the ibuprofen that I was eating like candy.

One of the other outcomes of this week’s trip to the doctor was that my weight is up and, not surprisingly, my blood pressure. Naturally she is worried about both. So, we’re going to try and adjust some things around here at mealtime. I think you will see more vegetables incorporated with dinner. I’ll likely see a cutback on my daily lunch outings. The goal here is to get my BP under control without having to curb my last real vice: obsessive coffee drinking.

This week’s shopping list will result in the following dinners:

• Cavatelli and rappi
• Pasta with broccoli
• Roasted tomato, chickpea and swiss chard soup

Al Dente On The Side: Chickpea and roasted tomato salad

In the proverbial case of whether the chicken or the egg comes first, often times we get an egg around here. Case in point: The Wife loves hummus but didn’t really eat a lot of chickpeas growing up. (I think that my father-in-law finds them offensive.) It was not until I started incorporating them into salads and meals that she really was exposed to them.

They are pretty harmless, all things considered. They don’t really taste like much on their own, instead absorbing the flavors around them. In this case, we have lemon, garlic and roasted tomatoes.

Al Dente on the Side: Chickpea salad

WHAT WORKED: Symeon’s Greek spice. I know it’s nothing more than paprika, salt and herbs, but this stuff can go on anything. If I could order this stuff by the barrel, I would.

WHAT DIDN’T: The feta. Either feta is extremely popular at my Wegmans or stocking the cooler is really difficult. Either way, my choices were brined feta (no way) or the bland Israeli feta that I used. All I want is basic smell-like-your-feet feta cheese. Sadly, I got flavorless white crumbles.

WILL IT MAKE ANOTHER APPEARANCE: Very likely. With the right feta, The Wife might eat it straight from the bowl.

Thursday dinner: Roast chicken breasts with garbanzo beans

Not all paprika is created equal.

For most of my life, I thought paprika was the orange stuff that some people would put on macaroni salad. It really wasn’t until the last few years, when I really got into exploring and trying new stuff in the kitchen, that I learned the difference. It’s really a product of my upbringing. We never ate the stuff. Frankly, if it wasn’t parsley, basil or oregano, it rarely made it into one of my mother’s recipes. That said, it’s the fourth-most consumed spice in the world.

This particular recipe calls for smoked paprika. Most Spanish paprikas are smoked, though they can range in flavor from sweet to hot depending on the pepper used. Spanish paprikas are typical milder, a direct correlation to the pepper grown. The peppers used in Hungarian paprika are bolder and sun-dried. This process maintains the pepper’s natural flavors, which can range from bittersweet to hot. The most widely found variety, found in the plastic McCormick bottles with “Paprika” splashed across the front, is good mainly for garnish and color. It possess little to no flavor.