Roasted Cauliflower and Chickpea Salad

An tasty, healthy weeknight meal; easily scaled up for lots of people or down if it's just you:

- Cut a head of cauliflower into small florets

- Rinse a can of chickpeas

- Toss both with some olive oil, minced garlic, a handful of cumin, salt and pepper

- Spread on a baking sheet and roast at 425 degrees for 20 minutes or so. Keep an eye on it. You want it to be browned and crispy, but not burnt...

- Throw on top of a bed of arugula

- Top the whole thing with a simple lemon/shallot salad dressing (lemon juice, olive oil, minced shallots, a little Dijon, salt and pepper)

Warm Butternut and Chickpea Salad with Tahini Dressing, Take Two

Remember this tasty salad that I made a couple years back? Yeah, it's still tasty, still easy, still pretty healthy. Try it.This time I served the salad lettuce-wrap style with some Bibb lettuce alongside some rosemary focaccia made from leftover pizza dough. Yum.

Chickpeas and Feta in Tomato Sauce with Couscous

Threw together this chickpea and feta dish pretty easily... rather than use a can of diced tomatoes, I used frozen tomato sauce I made this summer. Also substituted red wine for white, since that's what we had open. Finally, I topped mine with some Kalamata olives to make it more Greek. Tasty and ridiculously easy!

Sweet Potato and Chickpea Curry

So I haven't posted in a while due to a busy schedule (trip to Ann Arbor, softball playoffs, etc.) and a lack of new ideas. I've been re-making and enjoying old favorites over the past couple weeks. However, my former OSW girls came over for dinner and a Costa Rica trip planning session a couple weeks ago, and I prepared a vegetarian feast in their honor using veggies I had on hand from the CSA.

This chickpea and sweet potato curry from the voluptuous Nigella Lawson, via the New York Times seemed like the perfect meal for the occasion... vegetarian, but interesting, consisting of beans and rice (to slowly ease us into the diet de rigueur of Costa Rica), but still having some veggies and vitamins. I served it with a side of spicy roasted okra.

We all liked the curry- I think everyone came back for a second helping. The tamarind paste gave it a tangy authenticity that I liked. Plus it was pretty easy, using canned chickpeas and onion, garlic, ginger and chili chopped up via food processor. Colleen sagely observed that one could throw a handful of spinach or some green peppers for more color and veggie goodness (I lean towards spinach because green peppers are my personal devil).

Kale and Chickpea Soup

Chuck made this kale and chickpea soup a couple weeks ago while I was working late. Definitely good for you- meatless and full of veggies and legumes. But not the most exciting soup I've ever tasted- a little bland. Easy enough and a healthy choice, for sure, though.

Chickpeas with Bacon and Spinach (Topped with an Egg)

So, you could probably tell from my blogging history that I have a special place in my heart for bacon, as well as quick dishes with chickpeas and greens. Also, I subscribe to the theory of "when in doubt, throw an egg on it"... Tonight these disparate loves of mine came together like magic. This dish is ridiculously easy (only 6 ingredients), has bacon, and tastes amazing with a fried egg over easy thrown on top. I think Tim would second my feelings about it, but his memory of the meal may be tainted by the fact that the Nats scored 2 homers against his Mets whilst we ate it.

The recipe had one odd set of instructions that I took the liberty of ignoring... the recipe calls for boiling the bacon in water before browning it in the saute pan. While there is probably some specific reason for that step, I just couldn't justify the extra effort, nor could I ignore the disgusting images that flashed through my mind when I thought "Boil bacon?," which included that breakfast scene from "Better Off Dead" where the mother served slimey green boiled bacon because her husband doesn't like all the grease of fried bacon. So I just browned it in the pan, took it out and crumbled it, poured off the excess fat and carried on with the recipe. My only other suggestion regarding the bacon is that you not cook it further with the chickpeas and spinach- that only serves to make it soggy. After you cook the bacon, remove it and set it aside, then fold it in at the end. Enjoy!

Moroccan-style Quinoa with Butternut and Chickpeas

I made a tasty vegetarian quinoa salad with Moroccan spices the other night, very loosely based on on this recipe from Closet Cooking. I liked the idea of his salad, particularly his spice mix, which I made to spec, but I used different ingredients for the salad base, according to what I had on hand.

Here's how my substitutions broke down:

• I used regular quinoa rather than a mix of red and regular
• I substituted butternut squash for the carrots
• I steamed a bunch of spinach towards the end of the quinoa cooking
• I used toasted almonds in place of the pine nuts
• I threw in dried cranberries where raisins were called for

In the end, the spice mix complimented these ingredients very well!

Spanish-style Spinach and Chickpeas

A couple weeks ago, both Smitten Kitchen and The Minimalist posted recipes for a Spanish-style spinach and chickpea dish with smoked paprika (which is AWESOME... get some if you don't already have it)... both recipes were seriously drool-inducing, so I put them on my to-do list.

The Smitten Kitchen recipe won out this past Monday night, but only because it didn't involve a trip to the grocery store (which, in my case, usually involves waiting in line for a minimum of 20 minutes while the person in front of me vehemently argues with the cashier about god-knows-what).

Deb's was the meatless version of the two recipes, as Mark Bittman's involved Spanish chorizo. However, you didn't miss the meat in her recipe- somehow her ingredients and method gave the impression that the chickpeas and spinach were cooked in a deliciously meaty sauce. I'm curious to try Mark Bittman's version, too, for comparison. I'm sure his is equally delicious.

Anyway, this recipe was really tasty. You could serve it as an appetizer on little toasts, or, as we did, as a main dish, along with a green salad on the side.

Crunchy Roasted Chickpeas

I see food bloggers making these spicy crunchy roasted chickpeas all the time, so I figure they must be good. I made mine according to this recipe, sprinkling them with garlic salt and cayenne. Yum!

Winter Squash Salad with Couscous, Cranberries and Chickpeas

Yum- this squash and cousous salad with a citrusy dressing is really good. I used delicata squash because that's what I had on hand, but you could use whatever winter squash you have: butternut, kabocha, etc. I bet the couscous could easily be exchanged for quinoa or some other grain, too.

I made two additions to this recipe: chopped cilantro for color and freshness, and a clove of garlic sauteed with the onion, because everything's better with garlic. We ate it warm with the suggested walnuts and goat cheese sprinkled on top.

Indian Deliciousness, Take 2: Chicken Tikka Masala and Cauliflower Curry

After my last foray into Indian (which was mostly successful), I was watching TV and happened upon an episode of America's Test Kitchen on PBS in which they were making Indian food. I looked up their recipes online to see if they might be the magic bullet. Their method seemed pretty easy, and I know they obsessively test their recipes repeatedly, so I thought they had potential.

With cauliflower and potatoes from the CSA this week, I thought this was a good time. Plus, I could tell Tony wanted to bust out some of the Bollywood dance moves he learned from last week's Psych episode (which, funnily, featured Madhur Jaffrey, a famous cookbook writer who specializes in Indian and vegetarian).

The chicken tikka masala was really good- marinating the chicken in a yogurt mixture and then cooking it separately from the sauce made it really juicy. The veggie curry was good, too! My hands definitely still smell like the curry spices now, though, 4 hours later. Such is the price for a tasty dinner.

Butternut Squash and Greens Chili

This is a useful chili recipe to have in your arsenal. Healthy, tasty, easy (except cutting up the butternut squash = PITA!).

Changes I make to sass up the recipe a bit:

• substitute one can of chickpeas for one of the cans of black beans
• use whatever leafy greens you have on hand: kale, swiss chard, collard greens, spinach (this time we ended up using a bag of random mixed greens Chuckie bought by accident when I requested mixed baby greens.)
• add some cayenne (1/2 tsp) and cinnamon (a couple shakes) when you add the other spices

Enjoy!

Warm Butternut Squash & Chickpea Salad with Tahini Dressing

It's officially the start of fall: I got a butternut squash in my CSA this week.

I made this recipe a couple times last winter and really liked it. It seems like every blogger on the internets has done a version of this recipe, and for good reason. It's tasty, easy and pretty healthy. I like the different consistencies- the warm soft squash, the crunchy chickpeas, the creamy sauce.

Give it a try!

Served it with broccoli tossed with olive oil, garlic, red pepper flakes, S&P then roasted at high heat for like 10 minutes. Squeeze lemon over it.

Stuffed Zucchinni

Kim O'Donnell, formerly of the Washington Post (declining profits in the print media industry have led to lay-offs and buyouts of newspaper employees), started a new blog, "Licking Your Chops," last week.

One of her first posts was a combination of Meatless Mondays (a challenge to reduce your meat intake, for both health and environmental reasons) and Eating Down the Fridge (a challenge involving coming up with creative recipes that use up the crap that's slowly going bad in your fridge/pantry... cough cough MARTHA cough cough...the ultimate "mixed grill").

The result: stuffed zucchini!

This idea is kinda fun and totally malleable, depending on what you have sitting around in your fridge and pantry.

I pretty much followed Kim's recipe, since I had all those ingredients on hand. It was tasty. There was a lot of stuffing left over that didn't quite fit in the little zucchini boats, but I'll take it for lunch tomorrow.

Spicy Quinoa Salad with Chickpeas and Zucchini

Dudes, this salad is good stuff. It's spicy (not hot spicy, but full of delicious spices spicy), healthy, and super easy. Try it. Fo rizzle. MLT says "It's fucking good."

Changes I made to the recipe:

1. I didn't have the requisite cumin seeds, so I just used 1/2 tsp ground cumin at the beginning instead.

2. I may have added more parsley than required, too, just because.

3. Finally, I was lazy, so I didn't fire up the grill for the zucchini... I just put it under the broiler.

Moroccan Spiced Chickpea Soup

Made this soup tonight with onion and spinach from the CSA, and cans of chickpeas we bought at Costco. The spice in this was great... I would definitely make it again. It's really hearty, really inexpensive, really easy, and also pretty healthy.
The changes I made to the recipe were to include adding smoked and regular paprika instead of sweet, since that's what I had on hand, and I just plain forgot to add the sugar, but didn't miss it.