Butter Chickpeas
Let's say you like Butter Chicken, an Indian dish, but are trying to cut back on eating meat. Good news: you may enjoy not only EATING "Indian Butter Chickpeas" (NYT Cooking; subscription required) but also NAMING it. I recommend loudly calling it "Butter Chick-" and then whispering "-peas" instead of "-en," as I did to my backup dancers tonight.
We all thought the dish was very good, but one of my backup dancers felt it was missing SOMETHING. As we considered what I might add to the recipe to give it the SOMETHING he felt it lacked, he wondered whether that something was simply chick- (-en, not -peas). And that is certainly possible. Chick-ens taste good, I'm afraid. But next time I make this, rather than resorting to meat, I'll try throwing in an extra teaspoon each of cumin, garam masala, and paprika, and I'll add a teaspoon of ground cinnamon, too. Maybe that will do the trick.
Here's a question I have about this recipe: if you're aiming to break down the tomatoes, why not just start out with diced rather than whole tomatoes? Why suggest that a person cut the tomatoes in the can with a pair of kitchen scissors? Cutting inside the can felt like thinking outside the box, but it wasn't very effective.
Still, bottom line: this is a delicious recipe.
I came across an interesting tool today: BBC News published a climate change food calculator in August. You may find it useful if, like me, you've been wondering about the climate impacts of particular foods, like oat milk vs. soy milk vs. almond milk.
Encouragingly, according to the calculator, all of those options generate less than one third of the greenhouse gases of dairy milk.
But a lot of food choices involve environmental tradeoffs. While almond milk scores well on greenhouse gas emissions, it scores poorly on water use (and don't forget the fate of the bees that are conscripted to pollinate those almond trees!). See this comparison between almond and oat milk:
We all thought the dish was very good, but one of my backup dancers felt it was missing SOMETHING. As we considered what I might add to the recipe to give it the SOMETHING he felt it lacked, he wondered whether that something was simply chick- (-en, not -peas). And that is certainly possible. Chick-ens taste good, I'm afraid. But next time I make this, rather than resorting to meat, I'll try throwing in an extra teaspoon each of cumin, garam masala, and paprika, and I'll add a teaspoon of ground cinnamon, too. Maybe that will do the trick.
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| I do like cinnamon sticks. |
Here's a question I have about this recipe: if you're aiming to break down the tomatoes, why not just start out with diced rather than whole tomatoes? Why suggest that a person cut the tomatoes in the can with a pair of kitchen scissors? Cutting inside the can felt like thinking outside the box, but it wasn't very effective.
Still, bottom line: this is a delicious recipe.
I came across an interesting tool today: BBC News published a climate change food calculator in August. You may find it useful if, like me, you've been wondering about the climate impacts of particular foods, like oat milk vs. soy milk vs. almond milk.
Encouragingly, according to the calculator, all of those options generate less than one third of the greenhouse gases of dairy milk.
But a lot of food choices involve environmental tradeoffs. While almond milk scores well on greenhouse gas emissions, it scores poorly on water use (and don't forget the fate of the bees that are conscripted to pollinate those almond trees!). See this comparison between almond and oat milk:
For the bigger picture, I strongly recommend, as I have previously, the New York Times' guide to the environmental impact of food choices. And keep in mind, as BBC News noted, "Even the most climate-friendly meat options still produce more greenhouse gases than vegetarian protein sources, like beans or nuts." More chickpeas, less chicken!
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