It’s no secret that I love chickpeas, and so I was looking forward to trying out a dish with chickpeas as the main ingredient. Even better, the recommended side was mashed potatoes, and I am an even larger mashed potato fanatic, so the combination seemed like a match made in heaven. That said, for dinner on Saturday, we ate Chickpea Picatta (page 115) and Cauliflower Mashed Potatoes, or Caulipots (page 54).
The prep and cooking time on the two meals worked out perfectly because they were both finished around the same time. I started with the Caulipots first, and boiling them took a lot longer than the recipe said it would. Once the water came to a boil, the book says to cook at a simmer for 15 minutes but we ended up doing it for about 30. We also modified the recipe in that we added more than the recommended 2-4 tablespoons of vegetable broth, as well as a little more salt and pepper. Overall though, the taste of the caulipots was surprisingly good, and not far removed from mashed potatoes. This is particularly important to note because neither M. or I are big fans of cauliflower, but we could hardly taste it in the potatoes, and the consistency was nearly exact. I can see this recipe becoming a staple, especially because I didn’t even need to add more butter!
Meanwhile the Chickpea Picatta was, well, interesting. It definitely was a lemon-y, caper-y, shallot-y, garlic-y sauce, which I definitely enjoyed. But the taste wasn’t something super amazing that I would crave regularly. Rather, M. and I agreed that it tasted good and it is something we would eat every once in awhile, but not all the time. The serving style was kind of cool though, with a bed of fresh arugula, mashed potatoes on that, and the chickpeas served over it.
Made: December 30, 2012
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