Recipe: Hearty Chickpea Curry

At the Moscow Farmers Market there's a vendor who sells a delicious chickpea curry. I wanted to have access to chickpea curry on days other than Saturday, so I decided to try to make my own. Here's what I came up with. I think the recipe is fairly robust, and you can make various changes and still end up with something delicious. I'm not in the habit of measuring my ingredients, so I don't have precise measurements here.


Ingredients:
Dry chickpeas
Dry black chickpeas (can usually be found and an Indian grocer, addition of black chickpeas makes the curry seem heartier because they have a kind of earthy flavor)
Curry powder (a mix of ground turmeric, corriander, fenugreek, and cumin)
Salt
Olive oil (any other oil will work just as well, just pick one you like the flavor of)
Dried red peppers (fresh red peppers also work, some people prefer the chewy texture of dried peppers)
Green onion
Red onion (depending on how much curry you're making, you probably won't need a whole onion)
Garlic
Okra (or some other mild tasting vegetable)
Fresh cilantro
Heavy cream (or just milk, or soy milk, or coconut milk, or water, just something to make the curry a little more moist)

Instructions:
Mix the chickpeas and black chickpeas in about an 80% to 20% ratio
Soak chickpea mixture overnight
Drain the chickpeas and add more water, then cook until soft (I use a pressure cooker, and it takes about 40 minutes), and drain again (I like to save this liquid to mix with salt and oil and use as a soup base).
When the chickpeas are about done cooking, start preparing the vegetables
Dice the peppers, green onions, red onion, garlic and okra
Sautee them in the olive oil on low-medium heat until the red onions take on a brown-toasted color
Add the salt, curry powder, vegetables (including the oil they sauteed in), into the pot of chickpeas
stir
Stir in the heavy cream, just enough to make the curry moist, but not soggy
Dice the fresh cilantro and stir it in.

That's it, I hope you like it as much as I do. The version at the farmers market includes tomatoes, which I think would also be a great addition, I just didn't have any at the time I made this.

cooked, drained chickpeas

sauteed vegetables

the finished curry