Chickpeas with Moroccan spices

I've made this dish several times, and each time it's been delicious. I made it first with canned chickpeas--I like canned beans for their convenience, and I've never had bad canned beans. But I was dying to know - what was I missing by not cooking my own? So the next time I made it marked my first foray into cooking dried garbanzos.

Either I don't have enough sense to tell, or the canned chickpeas I use are quite good--but I didn't notice much of a difference in this dish. The canned chickpeas were definitely more uniform in their texture, but otherwise both were equally good. I have to say, opening a can is a lot easier than soaking, cooking, etc...

My level of familiarity with Moroccan food is pretty nonexistent. Going by this recipe, Moroccan spices, herbs, and aromatics are a lot of the same ones I use already but ones I don't always use all together--paprika, garlic, pepper, salt, parsley, cilantro, cumin, turmeric...I would never think to put these all together. For this recipe these all get pounded together into a paste--the most delicious smelling paste I can think of--at least because the word "paste" doesn't conjure up terribly fragrant things in my mind's nose.

The paste, combined with chickpeas, greens (kale in this instance, but swiss chard is also wonderful), and tomatoes, makes an amazing stewlike dish, perfect with rice. (It's been my lunch at work for a couple weeks--I did say I've made it several times, right? I love variety in food, but for office lunches I get into ruts of eating the same thing for many days in a row. They are always tasty ruts though.) I found the recipe in the great cookbook "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone" by Deborah Madison one day while looking for a good chickpea dish--and--serendipity!--it also happened to have preserved lemon as an ingredient. It's so funny how things jump out at you when you're looking for them, even if you never took notice of them before.

I'm still trying to figure out how else to use my salt-preserved lemons, but this recipe uses them to great effect. The lemon only gets added at the end, after all the cooking is done, and it adds an amazing dimension to the flavor. All in all, a wonderful and easy dish--especially, I suspect, if you have a mortar and pestle. I don't have one, though I intend to get one at some point--so I basically ended up chopping and chopping and chopping the garlic before attempting to pound it into a paste with the bowl of a spoon. For the end result, this extra time is totally worth the tired arm.