Sweet Curry Chickpea Casserole (with some changes!)

By admin | January 12, 2009

Before the holidays, I made a version of my Sweet Curry Chickpea Casserole from Vive, so I thought I’d show you how I changed it up!
This is a one-pot dish, and you basically chuck all the needed ingredients into a large baking dish, stir through… cover up, and bake until done (okay, you stire once or twice during baking, but that’s all the additional work from you)! You can then relax, sip champagne and sample decadent truffles while having a pedicure. Wait, that’s what I like to pretend I’m doing after prepping… really, I’m tidying/doing laundry/cleaning dishes/vacuuming, etc… you know the score, you’re doing it too!

So, when I made this dish, I had some black beans in the pantry as well as chickpeas, so I did a combination of both types of beans. Instead of yellow-flesh sweet potato, I used orange-fleshed sweet potato, since I didn’t have the yellow tubers on hand. I decided to reduce the onions to make the dish a touch more kid-friendly, and also increased the amount of diced apple. I had a handful of fresh green beans in the fridge needing attention, so I trimmed and chopped those cuties and mixed them in as well. The other change I made were using curry powder instead of curry paste (um, my curry paste had been sitting in the fridge a little tooooo long, and I didn’t want to chance using it)! Here you see the mix of ingredients, and I really liked how the black beans and orange taters gave such vibrant color!…

While it cooked, I put on a pot of brown basmati rice and let that do it’s thing. Don’t you love the smell of brown basmati rice??… gives a sweet, nutty, popcorn aroma through the house! To serve, simply scoop up a serving of that delicious rice on one side of a bowl, and then a hefty ladling of the casserole on the other side of the bowl (sprinkled with some fresh parsley - or cilantro, if you’re a fan!), and dig in! Oh, I should mention that a squeeze of fresh lemon or lime juice on each serving sort of livens up all the flavors and makes it that much more delicious!