BRAISED CHICKPEAS

a summer stew, if you will

Of all the recipes I have developed, written and tested recently, this is the one I have been most excited to share. The beauty of it is in the simplicity and ease. It’s incredibly hands off to whip up, but delivers an otherworldly flavour that has been living in my head rent free for over a month.

Let me rewind to a very brief but lovely holiday I took in Greece at the beginning of June. In the run up to the trip I had been obsessively following Chloe Walsh’s travels around Greece and I kept seeing plate upon plate of braised chickpeas, almost translucent, pillowy soft and bathed in oil. I was hell bent on eating them as soon as I got to Paxos, but they just didn’t appear on any of the menus in the restaurants we ate at, perhaps it’s a regional thing, I’m not sure, but I was slightly gutted. Lucky for me, I was on holiday with Stacey O'Gorman and she was on the exact same wave length. Having been there a bit longer than me and failing to find the sacred chickpeas at a restaurant, she had bought a bag of dried chickpeas and planned to cook them - I’m sure you can see why Stacey and I are tight friends. I was thrilled she had thought this far ahead, if we couldn’t find them on a restaurant menu, we would attempt to make them ourselves. I went to the source and messaged Chloe to get the low down of what was going on to make these chickpeas so good and she told me the secret is a lot of caramelised onions, taken pretty dark and folded through the stew half way through cooking - genius.

I had had a bit of a nightmarish time getting to the island and managed to miss a ferry which cut my trip short by a day and I was feeling the need to be very still and stationary for the time I had there. So when the idea was floated to do a day trip on a boat to a remote island, as a sea sick girly, I tapped out and planned to stay home by the pool for the whole day. I promised to cook dinner for the girls when they returned from their adventure, the chickpeas were calling to me. In preparation for my day of recipe developing (you know you’re in the right job when you end up working for pleasure on holiday) I soaked the chickpeas overnight and made a list of other ingredients I might need. That next day, with a vat of chickpeas quietly simmering away, I spent the hours reading, swimming, padding over to the stove to check on progress and gradually preparing the rest of the ingredients. It was close to the most perfect day I have ever spent on a holiday. As someone who is constantly busy, struggles to relax and is always looking for the next job, it’s actually very soothing for me to have a background job puttering away while I relax. I think I’m more able to relax if I know there is something progressing in the background that I can check on and nurture sporadically. This is probably a very unhealthy symptom of living in a world so driven by productivity, but frankly, if that’s what it takes to get to a blissed out level of relaxation on a holiday, so be it.

There’s far more to this stew than just chickpeas, like all good stews it has chunks of perfectly tender potato, there is wilted greens, which would be Horta in Greece but back home became spinach. There are wonderfully caramelised onions and garlic folded through, giving it a depth of flavour not often found in vegetarian stews. It’s topped with sharp, cold, salty chunks of feta, a pinch of Aleppo pepper and lashings of the best olive oil you can find.

As you can imagine, it was a steady 32 c every day on Paxos, and the idea of eating a bowl of piping hot stew was not top of my agenda. What I was truly craving was a stew served at room temperature, or even slightly chilled, and I can confirm that that’s the best way to eat this particular stew if you’re in a warmer climate. If you are on the other side of the world to me and in the midst of bleak mid winter, then you know what to do, eat a piping hot bowl and let the broth warm you down to your bones.

I think that’s enough of my swan song to the braised chickpea, but I have one final thought to round it all off. My favourite kind of food, the meals that stay with me for years to come, the dishes that return to my table month on month, are nine times out of ten the most simple ones. Delicious food is rarely complicated, rather the culmination of beautiful ingredients treated with respect, time and care.

Sending love from my kitchen to yours, Rosie x