I made chickpea curry again yesterday and just so I have a note of it for the future, I'm doing a quick post on what went in this time. I soaked 250g of chickpeas overnight and put them on to boil. In the meantime I chopped the couple of handfuls of chard that I bought yesterday at the market, an onion, two cloves of garlic and a small piece of ginger. When the chickpeas were nearly ready I put heated some sunflower oil and added the chard stems, onion, garlic and ginger and let that saute for a couple of minutes. Then I added some black and yellow mustard seeds (about 1 teaspoon each) and some black onion seeds (about half a teaspoon). Gave it all a good mix and then added the other spices, a teaspoon each of tumeric, cardamon, cumin and coriander. Then I added the last of the jar of curry paste, which was about two teaspoons. Used some of the cooking water from the chickpeas to rinse out the jar to get every last bit of it.
To all of that, I added my very last jar (0.75lt) of tomatoes. Oh the smell when I opened the jar. Heavenly. Really must bottle a very large amount of tomatoes this year. There was a small amount of basil in that jar but after a year and a half, there wasn't much of it to smell. I let all of that simmer for a while and then added the chopped chard leaves. At that stage, I drained most of the liquid from the chickpeas into a bowl. I then added the tomato mixture to the chickpeas and mixed it all up and tried to judge how much more liquid was needed. I ended up adding back in all of the cooking liquid (there was slightly more than needed but sure why not). I left all of that simmering for a short time while I took care of the washing-up and was just about to serve it up when I remembered that I'd intended to add some grated carrot. Typical. I took one bowlful and then grated a carrot into the pot. It's not like carrot needs to cook, now, is it?
I actually felt like having a more creamy than spicy meal so I dolloped a couple of spoonfuls of quark into my bowl and mixed it all up. It was all delicious. So much so that I went back for seconds. I liked it with the carrot, too. All in all, I'm fairly pleased with it. The bowls I ate were more liquidy than what I left in the pot. That was on purpose though as I want to use the leftovers to have in wraps for lunch next week and slightly less liquid is always good for that. There were three decent portions for filling wraps. So that's more or less all my food sorted for next week now. Monday evening is book club and we're going to a Mexican restaurant. On Wednesday a friend is coming to town unexpectedly and she rang me today to invite me to dinner with her and her husband. So I just have Tuesday and Thursday dinners to think about and I think I'll be taking the easy way out and just having eggs or pasta.
Or I'll have something like yesterday's lunch, which I really enjoyed. Bread from the bakery next door, this one is called Kornkaiser. About 50g of the turkey salami I bought at the market (it has gone up in price and now costs 25.50 per kilo - that's 2 euro/kilo more than it was in 2011, the last time I seem to have made a note of the price). And the little bowl is three teaspoons of quark mixed with about a quarter of a teaspoon of the curry paste. It only occurred to me to do that as I had already taken the jar of curry paste out of the fridge in preparation for dinner. Will definitely do this again!
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