Ole for Chole!

Hmm ... lots of craving for desi flavors lately - I blame it on the festival season! :) Actually, the main reason we ended up making a simple chole a few nights ago was because we were hoping to make do with the stuff living in the pantry. We finally ended up making a quick trip to Madison Market when I put the kibosh on making naans - which we eventually regretted since the Indian Life naans we bought were totally lame - but that's another story! :)

Anyway, we poked around the shelves and found several cans of garbanzo ... Yay! Chole for dinner. I love, love Chole, best when the chickpeas have been steeped in the juices and spices for a few hours. Hmm ... seemed like we weren't going to achieve that level of food bliss, but we could get close! We started off poking around Indira's recipe, but I finally decided I wanted more flavor - especially the ginger-garlic-green chilli explosion. So, we went with our own version of it, actually Pupp cooked most of it, I just was liberal with the free advice! :)

Chole

Servings: 2

1 can garbanzo beans
2 medium roma tomatoes - finely chopped
1 vidalia onion
3 cloves garlic
1" ginger
1 green chilly
1 t turmeric
1 t cayenne pepper
1 T sesame oil
1 t cumin seeds
1 t curry powder (ya, we took the easy way out :))
2 T lemon juice
a handful of chopped cilantro

Mince the onions, garlic, ginger and green chilli in a food processor to get a coarse paste.
Heat the oil in a work and add the cumins seeds. Once roasted, add the onions, etc paste. Keep stirring this till the onions smell cooked and have started browning.
Add the chopped tomatoes and saute for about 6-7 minutes.
Grind about 1/4 of the garbanzo beans and set aside. Toss the remaining garbanzo along with the turmeric, curry powder, cayenne and salt into the wok and cook covered for about 10 minutes.
Now add the ground garbanzo along with about 1/2 cup of water. Simmer covered for another 15 minutes with constant stirring. Mix in the lemon juice and garnish with cilantro.

We were really hoping to get the flavors to soak in with the extra simmering - I'm thinking a great alternative would be to cook this mixture in a crockpot for about an hour or maybe even bake it? Has anyone done that?

Ok, so now to the sub-par part of the meal - the naans! I knew I should've just made them myself!!! Instead we got the small Indian Life naans - these were really not good enough! I'm thinking I need to fry some yummy bhature to compensate for this the next time around! :)

Oh, and we actually had a pretty good wine pairing here - a Heron Syrah 2003 - the motley of spicy flavors worked surprisingly well! :)