Welcome back oh beautiful chick pea

This may be in the realm of too much information but stomach troubles have recenetly kept me from eating the beautiful chick pea. Well things are better and I was feeling brave so decided I wanted to have a go with the garbanzos. I had been looking through the cookbook from Vij's Indian restaurant in Vancouver realizing that we'd only ever made one thing out of it -- the lamb popsicles (which are lamb but not frozen, just creamy and a real treat for the tastebuds!) A recipe for a green onion and chick pea curry was found near the back of the book and it looked relatively simple and piqued my interest. So I did it. And it was excellent, easy, and fast. It's made with coconut milk but I used a low fat version so felt virtuous about the whole thing.


And as I may have mentioned, never will there be only one veg curry at a time. There was a load of green beans in the fridge crying out to be used, so I made one of my favourite Indian side dishes which I have been making for years and I think may have originally come from Julie Sahni's Classic Indian Cooking.

Basically you take a whole lotta green beans and clean the ends off. Then put them in a frying pan that has just enough boiling water to cover the beans and a teaspoon or so of tumeric in the water. Boil them for a few minutes until tender crisp then drain and put aside. In the frying pan, heat up a bit of oil and when hot toss in a teaspoon or so of black mustard seeds. Add 1/2 a chopped up chile (either dried or fresh), a few pinches of unsweetened shredded coconut, the beans, a bit of salt and fry for a few minutes until the beans are a bit crispy. Lovely.

Put it all on a plate with some rice and a colourful, quick, and not too spicy Indian vegetarian meal is ready to be enjoyed.