Welcome back to Sunday Scratchups, your weekly recipe from scratch around grocery sales and affordable ingredients! Easy Spicy Curried Chickpeas is a tasty and darn affordable vegetarian recipe, even when items aren’t on sale.
This is not my original recipe; I ran across it on Budget Bytes and decided to make some for lunch earlier this week since I’m on an Indian food kick after last week’s Dairy Free Chicken Tikka Masala. Cooking for one, I halved her recipe — and used flat leaf parsley instead of cilantro, plus added cayenne pepper for an extra kick.
Next time I might wilt in some spinach at the end and/or throw in a small diced potato and squeeze on some fresh lemon juice, but it’s great as is. Half a batch plus a piece of naan made a filling vegetarian lunch, and the curried chickpeas themselves are both gluten and dairy free.
Update: Since this recipe was originally posted, I now always wilt in some spinach at the end — it kicks things up another notch, and adds great color & flavor!
Easy Spicy Curried Chickpeas
Ingredients
One small yellow onion, diced
15.5 oz can chickpeas (garbanzo beans), drained
8 oz can of tomato sauce
1 tsp minced garlic
1/2 cup water
1/2 tsp cayenne*
1/2 Tbsp curry powder
handful chopped fresh flat leaf parsley leaves
olive oil
Directions
Saute your onion and garlic in a little olive oil for 4-5 minutes over medium heat, until onions begin to soften. Stir in chickpeas, tomato sauce, water, cayenne, and curry powder.
Chop your parsley and stir that in, then cook over medium-low heat for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally, until thickened.
It’s thick enough to eat when you can scrape your chickpeas away from the sides of the skillet and the sauce doesn’t immediately rush back in to fill the gap.
* Note that this gets spicier as it simmers — it had a very good kick with the cayenne, but if you are sensitive to heat you might want to reduce or omit entirely.
Yum, spicy, yum
Flavorful, spicy, filling, cheap, and pretty good for you — how’s that for a deal? (If you’re watching your salt, you can substitute lower sodium or no salt added tomato sauce + low sodium or homemade beans.
If you are looking for more vegetarian recipes, browse through the Meatless Monday category for some meatless dinner ideas.
Easy Spicy Curried Chickpeas, printable recipe.
Easy Spicy Curried Chickpeas
Ingredients
- 1 small yellow onion, diced
- 15.5 oz can chickpeas (garbanzo beans), drained
- 8 oz can of tomato sauce
- 1 tsp minced garlic
- 1/2 cup water
- 1/2 tsp cayenne*
- 1/2 Tbsp curry powder
- handful chopped fresh flat leaf parsley leaves
- olive oil
Instructions
- Saute your onion and garlic in a little olive oil for 4-5 minutes over medium heat, until onions begin to soften.
- Stir in chickpeas, tomato sauce, water, cayenne, and curry powder.
- Chop your parsley and stir that in, then cook over medium-low heat for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally, until thickened.
- It's thick enough to eat when you can scrape your chickpeas away from the sides of the skillet and the sauce doesn't immediately rush back in to fill the gap.
Notes
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Marion
Sunday 11th of January 2015
Looks so good!
rachel
Sunday 11th of January 2015
Thanks, everyone! Lots of ideas to try. These types of recipes are newer to me, so it's been fun playing around and I appreciate all the suggestions. :)
Joe
Sunday 11th of January 2015
some comments:
Invest in a pressure cooker, not slow cooker. On special sales, you can buy a pressure cooker for $10 in Macy's. The overnight soaked chickpeas would become soft in about 10 minutes in pressure cooker!
Second, if you do not mind editing this recipe...
In the hot pan, put oil. About mid warm oil, put cumin seeds and reduce the flame. Let cumin seeds flavor go in the oil. At that point, add, onion, ginger and garlic paste and saute them for about 3-4 minutes in mid flame or until the onion is slightly yellow in color.
At that point, your curry powder and then let it be there for about 1-2 minutes before adding drained and boiled chick peas and roast at mid to high flame for about 2-4 minutes. At that point, add in the tomato puree or sauce and roast for another 3-4 minutes, before adding little bit of water, chopped cilantro and serrano or jalapeno (chopped) if you want extra spicy... just little bit, not too much. Add in the salt and bring all of it to boil and reduce flame until the water evaporates and the chick peas are pasted with the tomato sauce. Serve!
You may replace chickpeas with kidney beans to make Rajmah as someone else pointed out above.
By the way, if you do not like cilantro becoming soft, add cilantro, serrano pepper and cut red onion after the chick peas are taken out from the stove!
Hopefully you do not mind me giving you an alternate recipe!
Suzann
Sunday 11th of January 2015
I made a similar dish after the DH had it in Trinidad on a business trip. No tomatoes and I used Blue Mountain curry powder--regular was not delivering enough heat. I soaked garbanzo beans overnight and they took forever to cook on a slow simmer--after several times using dried beans canned is the way to go.
jane
Sunday 11th of January 2015
That looks so good on a cold night! I think I saw something similar, recently, where they used the chickpea sauce on a baked sweet potato. Yum!