The mighty chickpea

I like garbanzo beans (and I prefer their cuter name, chickpeas), and I will cook with them, snack on them, put them in salads, or chow down on some hummus. So when I saw something in a magazine recently about fresh ones, I thought that might be interesting.

I saw some at the farmers market on Sunday and bought a bunch. After all, they were only $1. Yesterday I picked off all the pods, then shelled all the beans. And that sentence is SO inadequate to describe the amount of work that went into it. Think shelling fava beans if they were fricking tiny and you had to pick them off the bush first. It probably took me a good 35 minutes, and at the end I had... a small bowl of raw chickpeas, roughly the same amount you would get in a can for around 89 cents. And I still had to cook them.

My fingers were filthy, and it was the first time I've ever taken out the compost in a full-size paper grocery bag. Also, there was a huge mess in the kitchen.

With all that said, it made a pretty tasty dinner, and Z especially liked snacking on the raw ones, actually. But seriously... some things are worth the effort to make from scratch, and some things we ought to let the professionals take care of.