Monday 17 November 2008

Simple pleasures: Chickpea soup

There's nothing like a hearty, hot soup on a blustery, cold day. A friend introduced me to this soup earlier this autumn, I find it to be delicious and comforting. My friend and I are both "cook-by-feel" kinda gals, so there is no official paper recipe per se. My attempts to reproduce it with the following proportions have been wonderfully successful, but if you are an experienced cook, you can easily "doctor" it to your own tastes.

Chickpea Soup

Saute the following in a dutch oven with a bit of olive oil or butter until the veggies are soft:
one medium onion, diced
two stalks of celery, chopped
two large carrots, sliced into half-inch chunks.

Add 4 cups of soup stock (I use stock I made from the thanksgiving turkey) and bring to a gentle boil
Add the following:
one 14 ounce can of diced tomatoes (don't drain!)
one can of chickpeas (I drain them and rinse them to get rid of the excess starch)
a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste
2 teaspoons of ground cumin (or amount to your taste)
1 teaspoon garum masala (or to taste)

Bring all of these to a boil, then simmer over low heat for an hour or so to let the flavours blend. You may need to add more water (I freeze my homemade soup stock in a rather concentrated form, so I usually have to add 3-4 cups of water).

Simple, easy and tasty, this soup warms from the inside out, is easily doubled, freezes well and is generally loved by anyone who tries it.

Yields 6-8 servings.

Tuesday 11 November 2008

Payback: CBC Massey Lectures

I just had the pleasure of reading Margaret Atwood's latest book: "Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth". It isn't yet another book about debt management or personal finance. It is, instead, a description of debt as "a human construct".... an academic, literary and sometimes very funny work that every person who reads books of a personal finance, economics, money management, and business genres.

CBC Radio One's show "Ideas" is running the 2008 CBC Massey Lectures. Ms. Atwood is giving these lectures. The five lectures align to the five chapters in the book, which has a large reference section.

Drippychick's view: worth the read and the listen.

For more information about the 2008 CBC Massey Lectures, go
here.