Charred Fresh Garbanzo Beans

Last week our CSA box from Silver Lake Farms had an ingredient I’ve always wondered about, but hadn’t yet cooked with: fresh garbanzo beans! Still attached to their stems and hidden away in pods, they are the young, chubby-cheeked version of the usual dried-up old chickpeas.

I had to eat one raw, just to see what it was like, and it reminded me of a fresh pea: sweet and a little starchy. I’ve heard they can be treated like edamame, steamed or boiled and eaten out of the pod with a sprinkling of salt, or shelled and whizzed into a green hummus, or sauteed and dressed with a vinaigrette.

I decided to char the pods in a cast-iron skillet with oil and sea salt, and serve them in the pod as a finger food for a Saturday afternoon cocktail gathering that included Hilary and Alexi of Dawdling Darlings. I was running behind in my preparations, though, and didn’t get as much of a char on the pods as I wanted, because they arrived and the dog was flipping out and I had to take the beans off the heat so I could rescue my guests.

Next time I’ll keep the dog in the kitchen and let the garbanzos cook a little longer.

I’ll also be more careful to pick out the very yellowed pods, as the beans inside are a little too dry and starchy for this preparation.

Despite those caveats, this is a dead-simple little snack that is as fun and tasty as edamame, but a lot more interesting.

• Get the recipe: Charred Garbanzos at New York Magazine

(Look for fresh garbanzo beans at farmers markets or Whole Foods.)

EYG Gets a Makeover

Welcome to my new look! Thanks to the talented Lindsay at Purr Design, Eat Your Greens is a newer, prettier, better-organized version of its old self, with nicer printable recipes and a more useful design. I hope you like it!

Speaking of liking, I also have a Facebook page now, ready for you to like. Or “like.” Whatever, just click the button. I’m not sure what will happen, but probably exciting photos and recipes and healthy-food-related tidbits will occasionally show up in your feed.

Now get off the Internet and enjoy your long weekend!

Fragrant Yellow Rice

You guys, I feel really bad. I gave you a recipe for spiced lentils and promised to give you the recipe for yellow rice to go with it, and some of you* went out and immediately made the lentils. Without the yellow rice. You need the yellow rice.

So here it is, too late for yesterday’s dinner, but hopefully you liked it enough to try to again. And I’m sorry for depriving you earlier.

This rice recipe originally came from an Indian cookbook by Madhur Jaffrey that I bought at a thrift store many years ago. I think I picked it quite randomly, but it it so good, I’ve made it at least once a month ever since. Though the recipe is Indian, the rice also goes well with Mexican-style food, so I sometimes top it with cumin-spiced black beans and salsa, or put it in burritos.

To make it even more international, I make it with Thai jasmine rice, since that is the white rice I always happen to have on hand. I’ve thought about trying it with brown rice, but haven’t yet gotten around to it. With white rice, it takes all of 20 minutes to make, the rice bubbling in a pot with a cinnamon stick, a few whole cloves, a bay leaf and some bright yellow turmeric. After steaming, a little butter gets stirred in — you can use olive oil to make it vegan, but I strongly encourage the use of butter if possible — and you have a fragrant pot of bright yellow rice that is so much more than just plain rice.

Now go make some lentils and yellow rice already.

* At least three of you. I think that officially makes mujadarah the most popular recipe on this site. I knew it was special.

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Middle Eastern Spiced Lentils & Kale With Caramelized Onions (Mujadarah)

As I mentioned before, with the end of my full-time job and the approach of my first day of school (tomorrow!), I’ve been fixated on frugal meals that can be made in bulk and frozen in portions, for those nights when I’m too busy or tired to think about cooking. I know that the words “frugal,” “bulk” and “frozen” don’t usually connote deliciousness, but an exception can be made for mujadarah.

It’s not much to look at, but this Middle Eastern dish of spiced lentils and rice is total comfort food: warm, fragrant and full of yummy bits and pieces like crispy caramelized onion, fresh herbs and yogurt. There are a million different versions of the dish — and a million different spellings, try mujaddara, mejadra, mujadarra… — and mine is, well, mine. I claim no authenticity.

For one thing I cook the rice separately from the lentils, which isn’t normal. But the rice I always serve it with is spiced on its own, with turmeric, cinnamon and cloves, and has to be cooked in its own pot. And the rice recipe is Indian, totally not normal.

I also like to throw in a bunch of kale or other greens to cook along with the lentils, so that the finished dish is a full meal with enough vegetables that I don’t have to bother with making a side dish. Not normal. But more nutritious and I think even tastier.

I’ve been making my particular mujadarah for the past six or seven years, probably about once a month. I often make it for one, sometimes I make it for little, casual dinner parties and once I made it, to rave reviews, for a group of ten on New Year’s Day. There aren’t many recipes with the same claim to fame. It may be frugal and freezable and perfect for making in bulk, but it’s special all the same.

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Where I Am and How I Got Here

In two weeks I start graduate school. If all goes according to plan, I’ll be graduating from California State University Northridge in a few years* with an MS in Nutritional Science and all the classes I need to take the exam to become a registered dietitian. It’s exciting and a little scary, especially because I’ll be leaving my job as a personal chef to focus on school, which means a lot of belt-tightening and cable-canceling and frugal-meal-planning around here. So maybe it’s more than a little scary.

But mostly it’s exciting, because as Rob can attest, I spent many anguished years wondering what I wanted to do with my life, once I realized that a film school degree didn’t take me anywhere I wanted to go, and food writing was probably never going to pay the bills. I considered becoming a grant-writer, a post-production sound editor, an online English tutor. I thought about culinary school or an MFA in Creative Writing. Getting an internship always somehow sounded like a good idea. It never was.

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