Chickpea and Lamb Soup

This one is out of a recipe book of Mediterranean Street Food. It is an awesome book.

I did the lazy version of this recipe. The recipe involves dried chickpeas, and rinsing them and peeling the skins off and so forth. I just used tinned ones, and didn't bother with any of that.

So, throw a tin of chickpeas in a saucepan, with about a cup of diced lamb, a thinly sliced onion, a third of a cup of chopped parsley, a pinch of saffron threads, 1/4 teaspoon ginger, 3/4 teaspoon ground black pepper, a can of tomatoes and 2 quarts of water. Bring to the boil, and then drop in 2 tablespoons of unsalted butter and leave it to boil for an hour.

Stir in 1/4 cup of broken up vermicelli, 1/3 cup cilantro, 3/4 tablespoon of tomato paste and the juice of a lemon. Reduce the heat to low, and leave it to simmer gently while you make the thickening stuff.

Which is just 3 or 4 tablespoons of flour mixed with 2/3 cup of water, which you dribble slowly into the soup, stirring to avoid lumpiness. Add salt to taste and cook till the noodles are done, and then serve hot.

My biggest issue was that I found the vermicelli really hard to work with. Unlike other noodles, it doesn't break up easily, so I ended up putting too much in and it sort of monopolised the soup. But apart from that, it was really very tasty. I love these sort of Med flavours, so I thoroughly enjoyed it.

NOM.