Black Chickpea Curry from The Indian Slow Cooker

Not the prettiest dish, but tasty and spicy. I’m glad I finally found a way to use black chickpeas!

Last fall I got into the slow cooking craze, but it’s taken me a while to get comfortable with leaving the slow cooker while I’m out for the day. I did it for the first time on Friday when I made a delicious marinara sauce. When I stepped off the elevator Friday evening, I was greeted by a delicious smell that just kept getting stronger as I walked towards my apartment. I realized I should use the slow cooker more often!

Good luck for me, because there was also a copy of The Indian Slow Cooker in front of my door. I heard there were recipes for Black Chickpeas, so I had ordered a copy, since I had a bag of them laying around.

Golden beat soup and salad in the back.

An aside: during the summer, vegan boyfriend and I decided to have a “healthy” weekend of food, after eating a lot of junk (delicious junk) the previous few weekends. There were lots of fruit and vegetable dishes, including two with golden beets- a golden beet salad like one I had at Vida Vegan Con, and a golden beet soup from The PPK. I had a really hard time finding golden beets- they were only available at the time at Whole Foods- and were more expensive that the traditional purple kind. Vegan boyfriend, born and raised in Poland, mentioned the golden beet soup to his mother- who told him golden beets were reserved for the pigs in Poland. 🙂

So I spot these fancy black chickpeas at the natural foods store, and decide to buy them, despite the fact they probably cost three times as much as the regular variety. Then I can’t figure out what to do with them until I get this cookbook. Then I read in the cookbook… black chickpeas are often horse food in Southern Asia.

We silly Americans, spending all this money for food reserved for livestock in other countries…

Back to the slow cooker: upon getting home today, I was again treated to a delicious smell as I got off the elevator. It was so nice coming home and knowing that my chickpea curry would be waiting- along with the rice I had in the rice cooker all programmed to be ready just about the time I wanted to eat. Not a bad way to come home at all!