Winter Skies, Kitchen Aglow

This is a "kill two birds with one stone" post (never literally...after all, one uses a rifle to kill pheasant, not a slingshot). I have only ever used chickpeas either in hummus or in a Tyler Florence contorni whereby chickpeas comingle languorously on the stovetop with cauliflower, tomatoes, ginger, curry powder, and coriander (from Eat This Book: Cooking with Global Fresh Flavors). I felt it was time for me to update my repertoire. Also, it has been remiss of me not to participate in Ruth's weekly blog event Presto Pasta Nights.

This post is also a bit of a lesson. Though I have not yet acquired vast experience in the kitchen, I have developed some sensory awareness that was previously veiled (more like shut and locked away; there was a time when I actually did not want anything to do with the kitchen because it seemed most people I knew had a knack of pulling things off, and all I ever constructed was tantamount to a series of disasters). The recipe that I chose to follow looked enticing, but I never really thought about what was going into it. All I wanted to do was to use chickpeas a different way and to make a pasta dish at the same time. In hindsight, the two do not belong together, or at least not in this form.

Before this experience, I had never used a Jamie Oliver recipe, and I am not going to bite his ear off. I have to take the blame for this. I amended two details right off the mark - because I was not making a meat dish, I opted for vegetable stock instead of chicken stock, and I used small seashell pasta instead of ditalini. Combined, this is perhaps where I went wrong because the pasta and chickpeas absorbed most of the stock, requiring the addition of boiling water from the kettle (Mr. Oliver advises this might be necessary in the recipe), but there is not enough flavor in a vegetable stock. I mean, the point of vegetable stock is to be a light background note in a soup with a suspicion of the vegetables used to make it (i.e. I don't think you are meant to be able to recognize its constituent parts). This lent uninspiring blandness to the soup. Additionally, the chosen pasta may have absorbed more of the liquid on account of its greater surface size, but it does not really look that much bigger than ditalini. Now I am getting ahead of myself...

Pasta e Ceci
(From Jamie Oliver's Jamie's Italy)

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 stick celery, trimmed and finely chopped
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
1 sprig of fresh rosemary, leaves finely chopped
2 450g/14oz cans of chickpeas, drained well and rinsed in water
2 1/4 cups vegetable stock (Mr. Oliver suggests chicken stock)
100g/3 1/2oz small seashell pasta (Mr. Oliver prefers ditalini)
sea salt
black pepper, freshly ground

1) Into a saucepan on your lowest setting, put the olive oil, onion, celery, garlic, and rosemary. Cover and cook for 15-20 minutes, stirring occasionally (the aromas coming out of the pot when stirring are redolent of Spring, sadly not a harbinger of things to come).
2) When the vegetables are soft, toss in the chickpeas and cover with stock.
3) Cook for 40 minutes, still on a very gentle heat. (Mr. Oliver says 30 minutes, but in my experiece that was not sufficient time for the chickpeas to soften.)
4) Remove half of the chickpeas with a slotted spoon and put aside.
5) Blitz the soup, add it back into the pot followed by the whole chickpeas that were reserved.
6) Add the pasta and season with salt and pepper. Before adding the pasta, make sure the chickpeas are on the verge of being soft (but not mushy).
7) Once the pasta is cooked, check the water level. If the soup is too thick for your liking, add water from a recently boiled kettle.
8) Season as you please with additional salt and pepper and throw in some parsley or basil if you have some handy.

There is bland liquid somewhere in this soup, I assure you! It was not until I took my first bite that I realized all I would taste was starch. Of course. I thought at the outset that the pasta and chickpeas are both neutral ingredients needing a lot of help to eek out flavor. They both act as vessels for flavor, neither one imparting much of their own. This is a great dish if you have a cold and cannot taste anything or if you want fiber without eating spinach. Perhaps this would have been a treat, as Jamie Oliver calls it, had I followed his instructions directly, but if I just wanted an awesome broth, I would have been better off making chicken stock and knaidlach for matzo ball soup.

Sorry for the uninspiring debut, Ruth!

Labels: Chickpeas, Jamie Oliver, Pasta, Presto Pasta Nights