Chickpea patties and improvised curry

Tonight I got to help out with cooking and preparing dinner. Yay!!

tonight's dinner: chickpea patties and improvised veggie curry

my darling fries the chopped onions

Yokpok (my wife) chopped and cooked onions. In fact, she did most of the cooking, and I was merely the sous chef: washing and cleaning veggies (especially when there are worms and other potentially 'scary' bits!).

She's been getting more excited about food since I started cooking with her and since we set this blog up. I'm so happy that I can help out more with cooking. It's so much more fun when we cook together, even though I enjoyed every meal that she served me over the last four years of my studies.

Tonight's dinner used many ingredients from our patch:

snow peas from our patch

• rocket leaves (from the green manure patch!!)
• dutch cream potatoes
• snow peas (we dropped the seeds in February and they just popped right up in March!)
• eggplants (generously given from fellow gardener)

Other ingredients we could have used include coriander (we used almost two bunches, bought from supermarket), and the onions (which we'll have plenty of by end of this year). It's not likely we'll ever grow our own chickpeas or make our own Indian spices mix … but that's okay. We're not supers. Our goal is to grow and produce what we can. It's still an improvement over what I used to do five years ago, when I bought virtually every cooking ingredient from supermarkets (except the spring onion—I did have a few plants on my dim windowsill).

1. Chickpea patty

The first dish was a veggie patty, inspired by "The Ultimate Veggie Burger" recipe on the 101 Cookbooks blog. It has plenty of chickpeas, our main source of protein tonight. My wife has made it before, and it always tasted nice. In my opinion, tonight's version was the best, so I'm glad I documented it with photos and this blog post!

The process of cooking the patties is so interesting to look back at: the colour and surface texture changes from a soft, mushy light colour [left]… to a lightly browned crust that tells you it's ready to be served [right]. 

One reason why it tasted so good was because it was moist on the inside. It's not difficult to fail if you follow the above recipe. We used canned chickpeas, which saves a lot of time.

cooked and plated patties

Yokpok was worried I popped in too much coriander, especially because I didn't chop it that finely. There were stalky bits inside, and I reckon the amount of coriander we actually put in was triple the amount in the original recipe (1/3 cups became 1 cup). But it turned out just fine. In fact, I liked it with more coriander.

According to my wife, it has to be served with tomato sauce. I forgot to grab the mustard today but it would have worked too. The original recipe calls for avocado, and I think the creamy texture adds a wonderful dimension to the patties.

2. Improvised veggie curry

The second dish was also vegetarian, a curry made with expensive jarred spices (one jar Madras, one jar Butter Chicken) that we bought at Floriade last year. We don't usually eat vegetarian meals so it's interesting that both dishes didn't have meat!

I liked this dish a lot, but Yokpok thought it was too bitter. She finds it slightly bitter, which is due to the almost excessive amounts of rocket I added without tasting (with her permission, I should add! :P). Unlike the coriander, however, cooking it doesn't remove its strong characteristic flavour... and rocket is not a typical thing to add to a curry. She didn't like it, but I thought it was quite nice and 'interesting'—in a good way, that is. I know we'll probably never make it again, hehehehe....