*noteworthy

I would like to add here, that Alex did a fine job of making Vegetarian Paella!

Bean Soup with Chick Peas and Tiny Raviollis

This is my famous Bean soup. I added tiny raviollis. Dad really liked it.He had soup for the week.

Chickpea Burger

I've been wanting to attempt a homemade veggie burger for awhile and then I got my Parents magazine and this recipe was in it and it called for chickpeas! What a coincidence! Unfortunately, they were not tasty. That's why I had to mask the flavor with ketchup and mustard. Still didn't work. I think this is another one of those things that is best to just buy.

Garlic, Chickpea, and Spinach Soup

This recipe comes from Linda Fraser's The Cook's Encyclopedia of Vegetarian Cooking. The broth of the soup is mostly just storebought vegetable stock, but it has had a corn starch, sesame tahini, and heavy cream mixture (seasoned with salt and pepper) added to it, giving the soup a kind of potato soup consistency that makes sense when you consider the fact that there is, in fact, potatoes in the soup. Additionally, there are six ounces of fresh shredded spinach, a can of chickpeas, garlic, onion, cumin, and coriander. Overall, a successful dish. Tasty with the recommended sprinkle of cayenne pepper upon serving. We had ours with leftover pita from the falafel and, of course, insalata caprese—you know, just to cleanse the palate.

Chickpea Dinner, Dessert!

I have a lot to say. Sorry for the novel.
Here's the story of why I made these recipes. I always make brownies to celebrate the first Brown's game (it makes them losing not hurt so bad, right?) and I had planned on revamping those chocolate chip cookies with chickpeas but didn't want to make two desserts so I did a search for chickpea brownies and found this recipe. It turned out so good that I wanted to see what other chickpea recipes were on the same blog and found chicken with apricots, tomatoes and chickpeas. Sometimes I choose recipes solely based on whether or not I already have the ingredients and I did so I ended up making the chicken too! The Brownies were excellent and the chicken dinner was good. But first the brownies!

I made a half recipe since I wasn't sure how these would be and they were fantastic. I loved the texture and flavor. I had put some peanut butter chips on top of a little bit of it in case it needed more flavor but I'm glad I didn't cover the whole thing because it was unnecessary. The picture doesn't make them look as good as they taste because they are a bit crumbly (but only a bit!) so they were hard to cut. Go check out the recipe, there's no flour! It's just chickpeas, chocolate chips, honey, eggs and baking powder. Crazy.

The chicken recipe had some very strange flavors but they all worked together when you throw them in the same pot. The only part of the recipe I altered was that I used a half can of chickpeas. I'm really glad I did because you can tell by looking at the picture that a whole can would have been way too much. Plus I found mini-cans of chickpeas at Marc's so now I don't have a half can of chickpeas sitting in the fridge waiting to be used.

Falafel!

So Lisa wanted to be the one to start the "chickpea party," as she called it, but we were beaten to the chase by Kim. No big surprise there, but we did make these Wednesday, I just haven't gotten around to posting until now. Anyway, we've made many a falafel dinner from out of a box, but we've never tried to make them from scratch. That's what we did this time, using a recipe from Joanna Farrow's 30 Minute Vegetarian. It is definitely worth the trouble to make falafel yourself, as it turns out, but the pan frying made the first batch fall apart a bit. Still, it was extremely good whether in pita as a sandwich (cukes, tomatoes, and ranch dressing), or on pita as a "falafel pizza" (guess who had hers that way...). Oh yeah, there was also Mediterranean curry couscous on the side. Yum!

Roasted Chickpeas

I really thought these had some promise since the recipe involved honey, sugar and cinnamon but they did not turn out well. Eating them is like when you accidentally put a popcorn kernel in your mouth and try to chew it. Ouch. Maybe if I had taken them out of the oven sooner...
Recipe here