Not Meat!
I thought it would be appropriate and funny to follow a meat! dinner with a mostly vegetarian meal. Therefore I scheduled this chickpea soup for dinner last night. I thought if anyone complained, I’d remind them how they were all so happily rolling around in the meat the night before and needed to take a break. I found this recipe on a website called Tasting Table which is mostly a review and event promotion site for restaurants in big cities. But one of their “special” newsletters shares recipes from chefs at the restaurants they profile. Once I saw this chickpea soup, I knew that I’d have to try it.
As you can see, it’s not entirely vegetarian with a little bit of ham in the soup for flavoring. It required that I soak massive amounts of dried chickpeas for a day. Easy enough as long as you remember to do it (which I did, after watching Top Chef reminded me). Once the chickpeas were drained and rinsed, you toss them into a big stockpot with water, ham hock, carrots, celery, garlic, salt and pepper. Then you forget about it for about an hour. Adjust seasonings before you serve. It sounded incredibly easy and good.
Louisa was disgusted by the lack of meat and blandness of the soup. Annie had no problem eating it. Joe enjoyed adjusting the seasonings with his chosen hot sauce of the evening, and even had second helpings. Me, I think I’ve made better. I didn’t like the thinness of the broth or the disproportionate number of chickpeas to the other ingredients. Now I have a huge tub of chickpea soup sitting in my refrigerator waiting for a taker since I won’t be eating it for lunch. Who’s laughing now?
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What to do with left over chickpea soup? Perhaps you could drain the soup, add some tahini and make something similar to a humus. That’s just the type of experiment I would try. I’m not sure how it would turn out though.
Good idea and may be worth the experiment since I have tahini in the house.
I, for one, found the flavor of the broth to be delicately flavorful, with the essence of the ham. Although I used some pepper sauce, because I felt in the mood, it did not need it.