Instant Pot Pressure Cooker No-Soak Chickpeas / Garbanzo Beans

Tasty tender chickpeas with no need to soak prior to pressure-cooking - great for last minute dishes!

Need to whip up a tasty dish with chickpeas and don't have time for an overnight or daytime soak?

Voila, your prayers have been answered! It's up to you whether you add the aromatics or not but the garlic and onions are fantastic for adding flavour if you're using them in curries, Middle Eastern food, or hummus, and the bay adds a nice depth of extra flavour for Asian dishes. Obviously if you want to make a cake (!) or similar, skip all the aromats, and then you've also got the aquafaba (water they were cooked in) to use as an egg white substitute if you wish.

Spicy Chorizo, Chickpea and Spinach Soup (includes Thermomix method)

A delicious, hearty and filling soup, with spicy, smokey chorizo flavours, nutty chickpeas and fresh spinach.

Chorizo really is a star ingredient, packed full of flavour which is released in the oils when you cook it, which is enhanced in my spicy chorizo, chickpea and spinach soup by the fresh garlic, chilli and smoked paprika in it (which means that even if you chose to leave out the chorizo, to make this soup vegetarian, it would still have the delicious chilli, smoky paprika and garlic flavours in it). There are many different varieties of chorizo - some cured and eaten as they are, others for cooking, with regional varieties containing subtly different herbs and spices.

           

And then there's the question of pronunciation. Is it 'choritho', 'shoriso', or 'choritso' or something else - a certain feisty Spanish lady, Maria at Feisty Tapas is quite adamant it's 'cho-ree-thoh', and I'm certainly not going to disagree with her!

This hearty soup serves six - and if you have leftovers they will freeze beautifully - or the next day, you could transform them into a meal, by adding a tin or two of your favourite white beans to them (e.g. butterbeans, or cannellini etc., rinsed and drained) or some roasted vegetables and topping with a chunky, pan-roast cod fillet. Delicious!

177 calories per serving, if you're counting. [Calories in square brackets]

Hummus - with Tips for Perfectionists

Well, I wouldn't dare to claim to have perfected hummus itself - that's far too subjective!

However, everyone's taste is different and I hope that here many people will find either a great recipe for fantastic-tasting hummus (100% of home tasters preferred it to Sainsbury's organic hummus in a blind test!), or you will find some tips to improve your own home-made hummus to something approaching perfection, as I did, when researching it. Certainly, having the olive oil drizzled over the top, rather than an ingredient of the hummus was a real eye-opener!

I think one of the best tips (when making your own hummus) as far as flavour is concerned, is to cook your own chickpeas, rather than using tinned. If that really is too much trouble, then search out chickpeas in jars rather than tins, and ones which don't contain any chemicals, for a better flavour (I find tinned chick peas deeply unpleasant in flavour, tinny and slightly fishy, and I've only ever tried making hummus with them the once! However that's my taste, and not everyone else's, so I've scaled my recipe to a quantity which will be compatible with one tin of drained chickpeas).

This recipe makes a quantity of 410 grams (400 by the time you've had a few tastes to get the seasoning right!), which gives you eight 50g servings of 86 calories each (78 calories if you don't add sesame or extra virgin olive oil to the hummus; then add an extra 41 calories for each 5ml teaspoon of extra virgin olive oil you drizzle on top of your serving), perfect to serve as a dip with crudites (raw vegetable sticks) and pitta bread oven-baked sticks / crisps etc.- see here for my spiced Pitta Crisps recipe, and maybe treat yourself and have some Tzatziki / Cacik to dip into as well...

Let's be realistic though - who's going to stop at 50g! [Calories in square brackets]

If you fancy putting together a nice Turkish feast, with a shopping list and preparation plan, then have a look here!

Dried vs. Cooked Weight - Chickpeas / Garbanzo Beans / Channa / Bengal Gram (and cooking instructions from dried)

Another FAQ (well, one of mine!) put to rest in my own kitchen

I'm frequently Googling what the dried weight vs. cooked weight is of chickpeas - predominately because I detest the flavour of tinned chickpeas (I find they have a vaguely fishy and, unsurprisingly 'tinny' taint to them, so I won't use them for things like hummus etc.), and also for other people with this affliction. I try to make quantities in recipes convenient(ish) for people to cook them, where I can - so where I use them as an ingredient, if appropriate, I'll go in increments of 240g (as that is the drained weight of a can of a 400g tin of chickpeas), or 120g, so that people haven't got bits and bobs lying around.

So anyway, I usually cook my chickpeas in bulk (due to soaking time), cool and freeze in a big re-sealable bag so I have a ready and convenient supply whenever I want them - as convenient as tinned chickpeas, but taste nicer, and are far cheaper to buy! This time, I decided to weigh them after cooking, so I never have to Google it and wonder whether it's right again...