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Hello and welcome to freshly served, healthy vegan recipes. I’m Heather and today we’re going to make morocan chickpea stew. You can find the recipe for this over at healthyveganrecipes.net.

If any of you have been following my blog this week over on my nutrition website, which is healthyeatingstartshere.com, I’ve been talking a lot about spices, herbs and the use of salt in cooking.

So, today this morocan chickpea stew involves quite a bit of spices and the direction I’ve mentioned that you can replace most of the spices with an Indian spice mix plus some cinnamon. If you don’t want to buy the individual spices, if you don’t have them – it can get expensive to buy all the different spices.

But, I like to use the individual ones because it gives me more control over the flavors in the dish. So, we’re going to start with is sautéing some onions and ginger. I’m going to get those going in a small pan, and I’m going to use a slow cooker today, although you could also do this in a soup pot and then get the whole thing going at once.

So, either small and into a slow cooker, or sauté the onions and ginger in a soup pot. So, you just want the onions to soften up a little bit, they don’t need to brown, they just need to get a little bit translucent, which you kind of see through them.

Then, we’re going to throw in the ginger. The reason we sauté this vegetables before putting them into the slow pot or into the soup is they cook very differently when they’re in liquid. The flavor gets so much more diluted when it gets into the liquid.

When you sauté the vegetables it concentrates their flavors, so we do that first to concentrate the flavor and then they go into the soup where some of their flavors goes into the liquid but they still keep some of their distinct flavors.

I’m kind of losing control of my language here, but that’s okay. So, we start with the onions and the ginger because they have pretty sharp flavors and they take the longest to cook, and then we go with the next longest cooking, which is the carrots – I’m actually just going to throw the carrots and the zucchini together here.

All I’m looking for is for them to get a little bit of moisture on the outside, so they’re kind of sweating – a little hot in the pan so they sweat.

Carrots are pretty cool because they get to be a little vibrant state of orange when they’re just bare warm up. So look for that, and then the next thing to do is to add the spices. I’m going to use some cumin, some turmeric, some paprika, you can also use cayenne here if you prefer – cayenne is much spicier than paprika, so be cautious with it.

Just a little bit too much for me – here we go. In that directions I’ve mentioned, these three spices can be replaced by your favorite Indian or cumin mix if you prefer, but the special unique addition to this recipe is cinnamon.

So, I have this screen, what I’m looking at upside down – the mixing is pretty interesting for trying to see what’s going on in the camera. It’s like when you try to do things in the mirror, sometimes you do them backwards.

We’re going to stir these spices through the vegetables. The reason we do this is to get the spices infused into the oil – it’s just a little bit of oil that I used to sauté this vegetables, and if the spices gets infused into that, they will also retain their flavor once they go into the liquid in the soup or the stew.

So they carry more of their distinctness with them – distinct is the word I don’t know, uniqueness. I’m just been playing scrabble so I kind of get words on the brain right now. So, I’ve got some chickpeas in my chrome pot along with some water, and then I will add a can of diced tomatoes. You can also use whole tomatoes.

I sometimes do that when I can’t find diced that are organic, and you can just like smash it up with a spoon or something. They often come with thicker juice with them as well, that kind of make things interesting.

Next, I’m going to add some saffron here and this totally optional, but I just want to show you since Phil and I when traveling in turkey and I picked up some saffron for his mom who loves to use it. They say it’s the most expensive spice in the world and it was pretty cheap there.

So I picked up a whole bunch. With saffron, you need to soften this with some water first. What you do is you take it in a little bowl and add a little bit of boiling water or very hot water, not quite boiling and just let them boiling until they expand a little bit.

For those of you who haven’t seen them before, here’s what they look like, and them I’m just going to add a little bit of water here and let them soften. I’ll add this whole thing to the pot.

The next add is the vegetables that I’ve sautéed and added spices to. Get them all in there. You may want make sure that you have big enough pot for all these deliciousness. Then I have some chopped apple, you can also use pear. I was actually going to use pear but I accidentally ate the last pear for breakfast.

That’s what happened if you don’t pay attention. I’m also going to add some dried apricots – these one are very-very dark for some reason, they almost look like dates.

Dates would actually be another excellent choice here as well or raisins. Then I’m going to zest and juice some lemon, so here is a zester and what you just is peel off the very outer part of the lemon.

This is going to add some really nice flavor to this dish. Lemons are often used in morocan dishes, so very appropriate and I always take an excuse to use citrus zest and juice whenever I can.

I was just talking about zester today with my mom and Phil’s mom, they were mentioning that none of their friends don’t actually have zesters. They said that in every video that I zest, I suggest that people pick one up because they’re pretty cheap - you can find one in thrift stores usually, but even in the stores, normal store, you can find new ones were pretty cheap.

And they so such a great job, you can also grate the outside of the lemon but it doesn’t work quite as well and usually be careful not to get any of this white part, that’s the pith, its very bitter, you don’t want that.

Then you chopped your lemon in half, use a strainer or you can juice this in a juicer, but I just use a strainer over my pot and poke it with the zester and squeeze out the juice.

With everything in there, we’re throwing in this saffron, which again, is totally optional, because we actually have a jar full of saffron over here which is totally unheard of. We become a bit of saffron-holics and last but not the least, some pepper – put as much or as little as you like and some salt.

I’ve got a blog about some salts as well as the herbs and spices over at healthyeatingstartshere.com. Go check is out if you’re concerned about salt intake.

Stir that all together, and if this is in a soup pot, you’re going to bring it to a boil and then turn it down to simmer for half an hour. If you’re making this in a slow cooker, turn the slow cooker on to high, to get it to a simmer and then leave it, kind of as long as you want, but the chickpeas will expand a little bit, even though they’re cooked, they still expand a little bit if you let them.

So, if you leave this for too long, they start to fall apart a little bit. I recommend anywhere from two to four hours to leave this going. And then, the last thing you do right before you serve is to stir in some fresh parsley, or mint is excellent in this dish.

If you can find some fresh mint, go for it and then sprinkle a few sesame seeds on top if you like. You’ll have a wonderful healthy and hearty morocan chickpea stew to warm you up in a cold winter night. Hope you enjoy this, you can find the recipe over at healthyveganrecipes.net and I’m Heather, this is freshly served.