Chickpea Crepes with Black Eyed Peas and Spinach

I like an easy dinner. I guess everybody does.

I like chickpea crepes because they are basically two ingredients:
chickpea flour (or gram flour, or besan), and water. Stir together about two parts water to three parts chickpea flour, and let it sit for about fifteen minutes. You are looking for a batter the consistency of, uh, of crepe batter.

Liz likes chickpea crepes with dark greens like kale, and soyrizo. Well. I didn't have any of the usual fixin's, but this is a versatile philosophy, the crepe, so I made do.

I had some potatoes, and a couple heads of broccoli, and some spinach. I found a can of black eyed peas in the cupboard, - hey, that sounds good.

Some oven fries and broccoli florets went into the oven to roast with a splash of olive oil and salt and pepper.

Some fresh spinach, sauteed with garlic and chili flakes, with black eyed peas and a little secret splash of barbecue sauce.

When it's dinner time, get a nonstick pan over medium-high heat, spray it with nonstick spray, and dollop in about a half-cup of crepe batter. Swirl in the pan. When the top is set, run a spatula around the edge and bottom.

Gather all of the courage in your heart, steel yourself, and holding the handle of your pan firmly, like a tennis racket, flip the crepe over.

Take a single, deep, calming breath. That bitter taste in your mouth is adrenaline.

Two cups of chickpea flour makes about five crepes, and we had about just enough filling for four crepes, so that meant that I had to make a fifth, unfilled crepe, and just eat it hot, out of the pan, like a wild animal.

Serve up some some oven fries and ketchup on the side of your plate and tuck in!

Lemonade Syrup

Because we live a charmed life in northern California, people are always giving us too much fresh, organic produce. This is a real problem you guys, stop laughing.

Liz has a coworker who lives in a fantasy cartoon citrus grove, and so she just came home from work one day with a big bag of lemons. What am I going to do with all these fresh juicy lemons? There are too many to eat before they start to go bad.

Okay, well, I recall some traditional advice about this exact scenario, you know?

First, cut up all your lemons, I had ten of them.

I juiced them all on the totally boss citrus-juicer attachment on the MiniPrep, which is grossly underutilized in my day-to-day existence.

After extracting two whole workbowlsful, I ran the juice through a strainer and set in on the stove to simmer in a saucepan.

I threw open the cupboards to examine the sugar situation. A had a little white sugar, a little brown sugar, and a little honey. For about four cups of lemon juice, I ended up with about a cup and a half, total, of sugary goodness. I felt like basically any combination was going to produce some rad lemonade, so I just sort of followed my heart.

Shh! Fingers to lips: I also tipped in a half-jigger of vodka when it was really rolling and boiling, and let it go for a couple minutes.

This fills up a quart jar with just enough left over in the pan for you to reward yourself right away for your hard work.

We've been drinking lemonade all week. Tip about a quarter-cup into about a half-liter of water. Maybe some ice cubes, maybe a little more vodka, if you're ready for a summery evening.

Pumpkin Puree for Coconut-Pumpkin Soup

I may not be able to make a convincing case for this, but -- this is not exclusively a blog about winter squashes.

It maybe be about pumpkin today, but not forever. Eventually we will have to break down and start eating other kinds of foods (preferably squashes).

With the previously mentioned haul of garden goodness from my parents came along a "Winter Luxury" pumpkin, a fancy netted pie pumpkin with sweet, tender flesh and the coolest of all the pumpkin varietal names.

Liz found this recipe for coconut pumpkin soup, and I thought: yes. That is a good idea.

The recipe itself is pretty easy, so here's the scoop (LOL because of the seeds I am so clever) on making your own puree:

Start with your whole pumpkin. Give it a rinse and a dry, and cut it in half with a heavy knife.

Clean out the seeds and strings, maybe you will need a spoon, maybe you will need some scissors and a lot of patience. Anyway.

Roast this, face up, on a baking sheet at 450 degrees for like an hour. I just checked every 10-15 minutes, and when you could slide a knife in, I took it out to cool.

When it's all-the-way cool, scoop out the flesh and puree in a food processor. If you have a big "for realsies" food processor, one pie pumpkin is gonna be like one batch, but if you have only a MiniPrep, it will take like 2.3 batches.

That's it! It's creamy, and sweet, and delicate, and super-pumpkin-y. We took out most of this for delicious soup:

But we saved a little bit to swirl into our morning oatmeal with some cinnamon and maple syrup. This, too, was delicious.

Pear Sauce

What did we do with all of our pears? Well, we dehydrated some of them. Now we have a big bag full of dehydrated pears, and we shall see what happens to those later...


But for the remainder of the pear bounty: pear sauce.


Making pear sauce is like making apple sauce. Only with pears, you see.


So you get a whole giant big bowl of pears. These pears need to be peeled, cored, stemmed, and roughly chopped. It looks like a lot of work, but that's because it involves a lot of standing and repetitive motions.


I got maybe twenty to twenty five pears, and I added the juice of one medium lemon, and a half of a cinnamon stick. They were so sweet that I didn't need to add any sugar.


Then, you cook...


...and cook...


...and cook down the pears into a delicious concentrate. I hit mine with the immersion blender at the end so it would be a smooth consistency. Nothing wrong with chunky, this is entirely a personal preference.


We ended up with about 4 cups of sauce. I froze half, and we had some of it on our oatmeal this morning. It was delicious!

Grinding Spices

How do you get this:

From this?

There are a few reasons to grind your own spices:

1. It's cheaper to buy whole spices than to buy it ground.
2. Whole spices last longer than ground spices.  As soon as a spice is ground, it starts to go stale.  So not only do fresh ground spices taste better, you can buy whole spices in bulk, which, again, makes it cheaper.
3. Grinding your own spices lets you create your own spice mixes.  It gives you more control over the quantity of each spice, and it allows you to make decisions about the type of spice - for instance, if you want toasted cumin, you can toast the cumin before grinding it, instead of having to buy a whole jar of toasted cumin, and a whole jar of non-toasted cumin.
4.  Similar to #3, sometimes you need whole spices, sometimes you need ground spices, and it's easier to just have to buy one kind.
5. Some ground spices have anti-caking agents in them, like silicon dioxide.  Grinding your own spices means that the spices you're using are just spice.
6.  Perhaps most importantly, it's more fun.

When Matt and I made the Black Bean Pineapple Soup-Stew-Chili, the recipe called for Ancho Chile Powder.  The stores we shop at don't carry a lot of chile powder - they carry what Matt calls "Chili-with-an-i" powder - a mysterious combination of chile powder and other spices.  "Chili-with-an-i" powder is fine when you're making soup or chili and just want to add some flavor, but it doesn't let you pick out what kind of chile pepper you want to use.  And anyone who has tasted the difference between a Hatch Chile, an Ancho Chile, and a Chipotle Chile knows there is a big difference depending on what you want to use.

So what to do?  Luckily we were able to find some dried Ancho Chiles, and making chile powder is a pretty easy process.

The first thing you want to do is take the stem and the seeds out.  In chiles, the flesh has most of the flavor, and the seeds have most of the spice.  If you want to make a hotter chile powder, leave some of the seeds in.  Knowing how many to leave in is somewhat trial and error.  I would be lying if I said Matt and I never had to get rid of a dish because our chile powder was too spicy.  So if you don't have the luxury of ruining dinner, start with few or no seeds.  My theory is that you can always add tabasco sauce if it's not spicy enough.

Once you've removed all the seeds, tear the chile up into small pieces - about the size of a dime.  Put the pieces in a spice grinder.  We use an old coffee grinder.  (Do NOT use the same grinder for your spices that you use for your coffee, unless you like ancho-flavored coffee, or coffee-flavored cumin).  Add a pinch of salt to help bring out the flavor and facilitate the grinding.

Last step - grind away!  Keep going until you have it at the consistency you want it.

This whole process took less than 5 minutes - I was able to get it done while the peppers and onions were cooking for my soup.