Meal 22 kind of came to me in an interesting way. My parents gave me this little kit for making Moroccan Chickpea Stew that came with some dried chickpeas and a spice blend. At first I didn’t really think of using it for this blog, just making it for a meal one night. Making something from a kit didn’t really feel in the spirit of my little project, but when I read the list of extra ingredients and the steps (see the picture below), the kit seemed to be essentially a recipe and some ingredients to get you started, so I changed my mind and decided to make Moroccan Chickpea Stew as my 22nd meal.
Like I said, this kit had chickpeas and spices, but the recipe called for a lot of other ingredients like sweet potato, zucchini, garlic and cilantro. I decided to opt out of using currents or raisins, which were labelled as optional in the recipe, because currents are difficult to find and my wife is not a big fan of raisins. I also used our garden tomatoes instead of a can of tomatoes, because if I have them, fresh is always better!!
As the recipe above shows, one of the first steps in creating the base for this stew is heating oil and frying off cumin seeds (included in the kit) and then onions, garlic and spices. This smelled absolutely incredible! One or the things I’ve noticed through these last 22 meals is how much using hole spices, not just the ground version, makes a difference. This was really evident in all the different whole spices in the butter chicken recipe, as well as this one with using cumin seeds instead of ground cumin. I might honestly buy more cumin seeds after this because I liked that smell so much more than ground cumin!
Essentially, the last step is just putting everything in a pot together and letting it… well, stew! I then served it with some rice, cilantro and a drizzle of olive oil. It turned out great, a very warm hearty stew (the spice kit kept it really well seasoned). This recipe made a ton of food and was really filling as well! Another great thing about this meal was it was vegetarian and very hearty. I personally find sometimes when I make vegetarian meals they don’t fill me up enough, but this one definitely did!
I want to give credit to this kit, it was from KirunaVihara (https://www.karunaviharagourmet.com/) and they ship these kits from their website. The recipes are great and really easy to follow and the spice mixes are really well seasoned. Also 5% of their net proceeds go to supporting rural farmers around the world.
Thank you for reading another post! As always photos and the updated map can be found below. I hope you enjoyed meal 22 and hope to see you back for the next one!
Cheers,
Brandon
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