anti-vamp chickpeas

aka: roasted lemony chickpeas with smoked garlic and kale.

I love chickpeas. LOVE. Can't get enough of them. I feel the same way about kale and garlic, so this dish is pretty much my own personal version of tastebud heaven. It's pretty simple to make, and full of crazy big tastes that go well together. However, there is nothing, *absolutely nothing*, subtle about this dish. Though you can turn the leftovers into a stew (stew in red wine, broth, and crushed tomatoes), which will be subtle and complex and kinda sweet and will make you wish that you'd made a quadruple batch of this so you could eat it all week, even if the garlic reek has a bit of an adverse effect on your social life (the way around this is to feed your nearest and dearest this as well, so you all smell like garlic together). Note that you can use liquid smoke or smoked paprika if you don't have any smoked garlic. It's not something I usually have on hand, but there was some at the farmer's market this weekend. I felt compelled to use it in large amounts. If ever there were a city where vampire attacks could actually happen, I'd be Edinburgh, land of gothicness and downtown graveyards. Ahem. Just to be safe, I ate this tonight:

-2-3c cooked chickpeas + enough soy sauce to lightly coat them, without having vast pools of sauce leftover(I like shoyu)
-1 whole lemon, sliced in very thin rounds and seeded. You're going to eat the entire lemon, including the peel, so unwaxed and organic is a good idea. use an orange if you don't like bitter things, but I think you should try it with the lemon first. really. it's much better with the lemon.
-6 cloves (just over half a head) smoked garlic, sliced in little rounds. Sometimes I use a whole head of garlic, but these cloves were huge. HUGE. So I exercised restraint and only used half a head.

-1 tbs cumin
-1 onion, cut into thin half-moons
-4-6 sundried tomatoes, cut into strips (use scissors) and rehydrated in enough hot water to cover
-1 bunch kale (or chard, or dark green cabbage, or beet greens...)
-a few olives or capers (or both), chopped
-1 tbs sumac (start with half a tbs, taste, and adjust)
-sea salt
-lemon juice

Roast chickpeas and lemon slices in the oven with shoyu on fairly low heat (280-300F) for about 10 minutes. In a nice big pan, dry-roast the cumin powder and when it gets fragrant, add the onions and sundried tomatoes and their soaking liquid, followed by a splash of white wine. When the onions begin to get translucent, add the kale, sumac, and olives or capers. Cover and let cook. The cooking time will depend on how tender or tough your kale is. You can use any leafy green, really. Add lemon juice, salt and pepper to taste (but use a light hand because the chickpeas are going to be pretty salty). When the chickpeas have been roasting for about 10 mins, add the garlic slices to them, and pop them back in the oven for a further 5 minutes until the garlic is cooked, but not burnt. Either toss the chickpeas with the kale, or if you're feeling fancier, use the greens as a bottom layer and then carefully make a little pile of chickpeas on top of it. I think this goes well with pretty much anything. I (as usual) at it with spuds that I'd roasted at the same time as the chickpeas were going.

garlic boogie music: in the afterlife, Squirrel Nut Zippers.