Sigh.
Living in Casa Del Deadlines sometimes has unpleasant consequences. Unpleasant consequences, such as occasionally committing misdebeanors like wasting 7 cups of organic, home re-hydrated chickpeas.
I had my whole chick pea adventure plotted out in my head.
“The Chickpea,”
I was going to say
“is the cutest and most powerful legume of all. If the chickpea were a cartoon character, it would be a Powerpuff girl.”
In deference to the garbanzo’s might, I started my experiment in earnest. I purchased a heavier than usual load of beans, and even went for organic because I was feeling lazy and wealthy and it was convenient.
I boiled those suckers with a half strip of Kombu, this krazy Japanese seaweed that mineralizes, tenderizes, and degassifies beans, as well as expanding to four times its original size and turning the surface of the bean water into an alien meringue landscape.
Does the krazy kombu do this to other legumes as well? Who knows. I haven’t tried yet.
The other thing I don’t know is what traditional italian chickpea cookies taste like, or whether hummus really is better if you make it from dried chickpeas, like Eric Markus keeps saying in his Vegan Diner podcasts. Personally, I find that kind of insistence a little annoying, but my point here is, I’m not going to find out for myself for a while now.
I did eat a cup of chickpeas totally plain, all by themselves before I got all procrastinatey and let them go horribly stinkin’ bad, which, I guess, if you simply must ruin 7 more cups of beans after that, is at least the best way to eat them.
