Chana Masala, Roast Orange Chicken and a Flexible Cabbage Salad
I married a man who doesn’t like chickpeas. This has been tricky to wrap my head around, given that, as a kid, I would eat canned chickpeas as a snack, drained and unadorned, admiring how each one looked like a tiny cartoon peach before popping it in my mouth. But marriage is about compromise and understanding. So when I cook chickpeas at home, I seek out recipes where they sort of melt into the dish and lose that aggressively starchy taste that I think might be the issue.
Chana masala is a favorite for both of us, and Zainab Shah’s recipe can be made with either canned or dried chickpeas (she has a tip for the latter). Either way, those bulbous little legumes become tender and soft and soak up the cumin, coriander, turmeric and chile, plus the garlic and ginger paste that forms the backbone of this dish. I serve it with rice and — because we both can’t get enough of anything spicy, salty and sour — lime pickle.
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Chana Masala
What else to make with a can of chickpeas? Sharon Attia has 11 more suggestions for you in her excellent list of garbanzo-based dinner ideas. I can tell you that Melissa Clark’s recipe for coconut curry chickpeas with pumpkin and lime is a favorite around here, as is Alexa Weibel’s creamy chickpea pasta with spinach and rosemary.
For whatever reason, I like to buy a whole chicken for a Saturday or Sunday dinner — chicken parts, I’ve decided, are for the weekdays. So tomorrow, I’d like to make Genevieve Ko’s roasted orange chicken, which sounds like an amazing use of all those clementines I can’t stop buying.
Leftover chicken can go into this cabbage salad with miso-sesame vinaigrette, but as Kenji López-Alt notes, his recipe is very flexible: “Thinly sliced leftover steak, shredded salmon or sliced dense tofu could easily take the place of the chicken,” and “You could opt for shredded carrots and diced jicama instead of cucumber and radish, or add a handful of split cherry tomatoes and raw snap peas cut on a bias.”
And when I’m not selecting recipes based on my self-enacted rules or what I think we’ll like, I’m going by what in the fridge needs to be used up, like, yesterday. Right now, that’s a package of brussels sprouts I forgot I had and a couple of big spoonfuls’ worth of grapefruit marmalade. The sprouts can go into this roasted brussels sprouts and tofu with chile lime dressing from Kristina Felix, and I’m pretty sure I can swap in the grapefruit marmalade for the orange variety called for in David Tanis’s easy apple tart.
