Chickpea Dal

I have been making this recipe from Vegetarian Times magazine since 2005. It is very easy, cheap, quick, tasty, and made from ingredients I frequently have hanging around anyway. However I found to my interest that while it goes well over fresh hot white rice, it doesn't go well over fresh room-temperature white rice noodles. Go figure.



All you need is 2 15 oz. cans chickpeas, 2 tomatoes, 1 onion, 1 .5 T curry powder, and an inch off a knob of peeled ginger. In a blender puree the tomatoes, ginger, and onion. Then put the puree in a fry pan and simmer with curry powder about 5 minutes. Stir in the drained, rinsed chickpeas and cook another 5 minutes. Bam, you're done.

First I served this with steamed broccoli, rice, and leftover Virginia Peanut Soup. It was a hit. Then the next day I served leftover chickpea dal and leftover broccoli over softened and rinsed vermicelli rice noodles. Everyone felt the same about this not-quite-satisfying dish but we all reacted differently: 1) I suffered in silence 2) George asked me why I thought this dish was a good idea and dumped all his rice noodles into my bowl, then munched the rest 3) Doug, my father-in-law, said "This is great!" then poured the peanut soup into his bowl and also poured in all the leftover white rice and mixed it up, happily munching. There's a lesson in this somewhere.