Chickpeas For Dinner

what to cook when all you want to do is scream

all of us since at least 2016

I’ll say it. It feels totally ridiculous that we have to go to work, do chores, and make dinner while our world keeps falling apart. This mixture of banality, endless anxiety, and terror is A LOT. For those of you with unlimited PTO, you should just go full ghost protocol until we can get a new administration in the White House. But the rest of us? We’ve still got to work despite *gestures to the whole world*. While we should protest and resist in thousands of different ways, we still need to take care of ourselves and our homes. This is going to be a long road, and we need make sure we don’t burn out because we’re living on tortilla chips and bean dip. So, for the next few weeks, I am going to focus on food you should keep stocked up and recipes that are fast to throw together so you can take care of yourself and your community during this storm of bullshit. Chickpea flour is the perfect place to start.

A flour by any other name…

Chickpea flour is one of those ingredients that sounds like hippie nonsense, but it couldn’t be farther from the truth. Chickpea flour, often called Besan or Gram flour, is made from ground chickpeas and is naturally gluten free and high in protein. Unlike the seemingly endless list of alternative flours and binders I see people pushing online, chickpea flour absolutely deserves a place in your pantry. It’s used in culinary traditions across the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean, Italy, and France. Yeah, it’s an ingredient with RANGE. You can even make tofu with it. You can find it at your local health food store but for a much better price, look online or with your local Indian or Burmese grocery store. It lasts for a long time in your pantry or freezer so don’t be afraid to grab a large bag. With the way grocery prices are set to explode here in the US, you might want to do this soon rather than later. For other items you should be stocking up on, check right here.

I am certain you could mill chickpea flour yourself with the right equipment but I’m not going to bother with that unless I absolutely have to. Work smarter, not harder is a life value of mine. This weekend and next, we’re going to explore chickpea flour and all the thousands of things you can do with it. First up, stove top cooking.

Chickpea tofu sticks are a fav of mine

Last Sunday, we talked about pancakes because I wanted to draw a clear line between your pancake skills and the skills you need to cook with chickpea flour. See? No need to be intimidated, you already know what you’re doing. There are plenty of recipes from all over the world for chickpea flour crepes which go by many names like socca in France, farinata in Italy, and fainá in Urugay and Argentina. The ingredients vary slightly but the basics remain the same: chickpea flour, seasoning, fat, and water. You know something is good when people all over the world make a version of it. Hell, I even used a little chickpea flour in my banana crepe recipe from several years ago. The idea is simple: a thin, pancake-like batter is poured over a hot surface, flipped, and served right away. Once you get the batter right, you can make an endless number of meals and snacks.

Tomorrow, I am going to show you how to make a simple chickpea batter that you can endlessly adapt based on what you have to make scrambles, omelets, crepes, and thick pancakes that you serve like cake wedges. Not on the list? Let’s fix that.

Do you already love cooking with chickpea flour? Are there other staples you want me to explore so we can all get creative with less? Let me know in the comments!

xoxo,

Michelle