I sing the praises of chickpeas. How I love them.

Tonight was a simple dinner that doesn’t qualify as a mush, but feels much the same. It goes together easily in one pot, feels comforting to eat out of a bowl, and makes lots of servings.

I pre-soak beans of all sorts, drain them, and then freeze them in bags. Then I can pop them out of the freezer, bring them to a boil on the stovetop, and them pop them into the over @ 250°F for 40 minutes or so. This isn’t actually quick, but it requires next to no effort. And I’m now spoiled on home cooked beans and canned ones don’t seem as good.

Drain the chickpeas.
Into the now empty chickpea pot, put olive oil.
Heat oil and then add chopped onion and garlic, sauteeing until softened and starting to become translucent.
Dump in .5 lb of frozen okra. Cook until it mostly thaws out.
Add the chickpeas and a big can of diced tomatoes.
Bring to a simmer.
Crumble in a generous amount of feta.
Eat.

Oh wow, Warner and I whipped up the best dinner I’ve had at home in a very long time.

He made tomato pudding. I made sweet potato curry and lemon-roasted asparagus. It was all so good and pretty on the plate–red and orange and green and yellow.

I made up the sweet potato curry as I went along, so I’ll jot it down before I forget…

• Peel 4 small-to-medium sweet potatoes and cut into 1/2 inch cubes.
• Cut one onion and one green pepper into approximately 1 x .25 inch strips.
• Heat up a generous pour of vegetable oil in a large-ish heavy bottomed pan.
• Fry onion and green pepper over medium-high heat until getting a bit soft.
• Add a tablespoon or two of jarred curry paste (I had vindaloo on hand, but others I have tried would have worked just as well.)* Stir to mix well until the fragrance seems to peak.
• Lower heat a bit and dump in a can of coconut milk. Stir to mix well.
• Add sweet potatoes and bring to simmer.
• Cover and simmer, stirring occasionally, about 20 minutes or until the sweet potatoes are cooked through.
• Serve with rice.

I’ll write up the lemon-roasted asparagus later. It is one of my mottoes that roasting is the best way to cook nearly anything…

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* I get these on the cheap at the Indian grocery and they are very handy.

Last night I had dinner at Il Palio with Diane Kelly and a faculty position candidate, Jenna Hartel. Jenna’s dissertation was on information behavior in the hobby of gourmet cooking. At one point during dinner, she explained that there are two categories of food hobbyists: the gourmets and the down-home cooks. The latter are concerned with simplicity and low cost, while the former love the exotic and the complicated, which tends to translate (in my experience) to the more expensive.

Anyway, last night at Il Palio, I ate:

• Local Bibb Lettuces - Oven Dried Tomatoes, Radishes and Parmesan Dressing
• Bucatini all’Amatriciana - House Cured Guanciale, Onion and Spicy Tomato Sauce
• Bailey’s Crème Brulée - Bailey’s, Kahlua, Vanilla Bean Custard

The crème brulée was probably the best I ever remember eating, but the rest was just ok.

And I actually got ill when I got home. Blech.

Tonight is a much more down-home night.

Actually the truth is that I’ve had too much going on to feel like I can stop and figure out what to cook at home, so I don’t have a plan and I don’t have supplies. Sometimes it seems too overwhelming to think about what to eat for the next week and I just blank on it and ignore it. Then nights like tonight happen.

I had a bag of pre-soaked kidney beans in the freezer, so I put those in a pot, covered them with water, brought that to a boil, covered the pot and stuck it in the oven at 250°F for 45 minutes while I made a phone call to a friend and folded my laundry.

When the beans were cooked, I drained them. Diced an onion. Sauteed it in veg oil until it was soft. Threw in the beans. Threw in a couple of cups or so of mixed frozen vegetables, a frozen tablespoon lump of tomato paste,* and a jar of spaghetti sauce. Added some salt, a healthy amount of dried oregano, and a bit of red pepper flakes. Cooked until everything was hot and cooked through.

I cooked a couple of potatoes in the microwave.

Then a big pile of the mush from the stove was piled on top of a potato and that whole mess was covered with shredded “Italian style” cheese, and popped back into the microwave to melt the cheese.

I’m eating it now as I type. Actually it isn’t terrible. It isn’t good, but I’ve thrown together much worse.

And so it goes. After dinner I’ll make a menu for the next few days. And a grocery list.

I’m thinking some sort of curried winter squash. I have a surfeit of coconut milk and basmati rice. Yum.

* I freeze the leftover tomato paste when a recipe doesn’t use a whole can. I wrap individual lumps in plastic wrap and put all the lumps in a storage bag in the freezer.

This is a terrible photo that I continue to intend to replace. Alas.

I created this recipe after having the black bean and pepper cheese soup at Bridgetown Grill. Mine’s not as spicy, though you can add as many jalapenos as you like to up the spiciness. We generally eat this with a loaf of crusty bread from the farmer’s market, and a green salad.

• 2 medium onions, chopped
• 6 cloves garlic, peeled & coarsely chopped
• 1 jalapeno pepper, seeded & finely diced
• 2 15 oz cans black beans
• 2 15 oz cans great northern beans
• 1 15 oz can sweet golden corn
• 1 can vegetable broth
• 2 cups sharp cheddar cheese, grated
• green onion, chopped for garnish

• In a large heavy bottomed soup pot, sauté the onions, garlic, and jalapeño in a bit of vegetable oil until very soft.
• Purée the cooked mixture in a blender with some of the veggie broth added in to facilitate blending. Return puréed mixture to soup pot.
• Purée each can of beans and corn one at a time. Do not drain the beans and corn. Add veggie broth to the blender if extra liquid is needed. Add the puréed beans and corn to the soup pot.
• Heat the soup through. When the soup is hot stir in the cheese. Stir until the cheese is melted and blended in with the soup.
• Garnish individual bowls of soup with chopped green onions.
• To make this soup extra snazzy for entertaining, heat the black bean purée separately while preparing the rest of the soup as above. You’ll have a “black” mixture and a “white” mixture. Fill each serving bowl 2/3 full with the white mixture. Carefully spoon several spoonfuls of the black mixture into the center of each bowl. You’ll fill the bowl while creating a black spot in the center of the bowl. Garnish with green onions.