Oh. My. Word. I love you more than I did yesterday - Chorizo and Chickpea Stew

 

 

Don't you love those dishes that taste even better the day after you made them? I do, not least because they lend themselves to stress free cooking if you have people coming round and also they encourage you make a vat of the stuff, knowing that you have the day or the day after's meal totally sorted without so much as a second thought.

Which brings me to this gorgeous stew, discovered initially in Joanna Weinberg's 'How to feed your friends with relish', a cookbook with lots more, not just delicious recipes but tips on entertaining, suggested menus and so on. Weinberg name checks the origins of this stew are the Brindisa store/cafe in London, the importer of all things Spanish and wonderful so its provenance is to be raved about.

The original recipe within the cookbook feeds 25 - that's more leftovers than I can deal with - so the ingredients below have been scaled down to feed 4/6 as a main meal, or more if it’s part of a tapas menu. How wonderful would that be? Tapas! The scaling down from the original recipe therefore are approximate with an eye on the things that we like to eat so, a little more chorizo and garlic, as we can't really get enough of either of them.

Lola and Finn quite like this. It looks a spicy dish but it's not really - it's pleasantly warming and is more about depth of flavour than a flash of spicy heat. The fact that it disguises chickpeas into something palatable as far as Lola and Finn are concerned (not me; I love chickpeas) is an added bonus.

I juzzed this up from a simple weeknight meal by adding some sourdough bread for dunking purposes and I opened a bottle of rioja. It's always the right time for rioja.

 

Rioja – My favourite, favourite rioja. All is well with the world when I slosh some of this into a huge goblet…

As they say in Spain, and this house when I'm on my second glass of rioja, olé!

Chorizo and Chickpea Stew, scaled down and adapted from the original in Joanna Weinberg's 'How To Feed Your Friends With Relish.

Serves Lola, Finn, Mum, Dad and 2 others as a main meal.

Ingredients:

250g cooking pancetta, chunkily sliced (I have used a chorizo ring in the past if you can't find cooking chorizo)

150g diced pancetta
4 shallots, chopped (original recipe is red onion - I'm not crazy about it cooked) 1 red pepper - deseeded and chopped
olive oil
3 garlic cloves - chopped
2 tsp dried oregano
300g passata
2 x 400g cans chickpeas, drained 
100ml white wine

200ml Chicken Stock or water.
A handful of flat leaf parsley chopped (I actually chopped the stalks finely and threw them into the stew when I put the stock in - I hate wasting them!) Salt and black pepper, to taste

Method

 

 

Fry the chorizo and pancetta in a large saucepan over a fairly high heat until it begins to colour and releases oil. Remove with a slotted spoon.

 

 Fry the shallots and pepper in the residual oil left from frying the meat. There should be enough to turn everything a gorgeous reddish hue, but add extra olive oil if you need to.

Return the meat to the pan, turn the heat down, and add the garlic and oregano and fry for a few more minutes.

Add the passata, chickpeas, wine, stock, parsley stalks, a little salt and some pepper.

Bring to the boil and simmer for 20 minutes or so, though I left it longer as I like quite a ‘thick’ stew. Taste for seasoning.

 

Add the roughly chopped parsley to serve. Or leave it for a day and eat it then. You will love it!