Recently I had some friends over for the first time for dinner and board games.

Ticket to Ride, in fact. Have you played? It’s one of the best!

I was pretty short on time, having worked that day, so I put together one of my favorite quick recipes: creamy coconut chickpea curry. I felt super guilty as they heaped praise upon me, because this is one of the quickest and easiest things I make! So quick and easy, in fact, that I threw it together on my lunch break today when I ran home to grab a few things I’d forgotten and needed at the office.

It’s also quite pretty!

I think it’s about time that I share this magic with you. You need only a handful of ingredients to eat well:

• 2 tablespoons coconut oil (you can also use vegetable or canola)
• 2 medium to large onions, chopped
• 2 large garlic cloves, minced
• 1 small knob ginger, minced (optional but great)
• 1.5 tablespoons spices – curry powder, chana/chhole mix, or your own blend (see below)
• 3 cups of chickpeas
• 1 28 oz can organic chopped tomatoes, partially drained
• 1 14oz can organic full-fat coconut milk
• salt to taste
• juice of one lemon, or chaat masala (per instructions)
• optional: squeeze of agave nectar or teaspoon of sugar for sweetness
• optional: fresh methi (fenugreek) or cilantro, chopped
• optional: a couple of pinches of red pepper flakes, for extra spice

You have three choices for the spice mix. If you have a standard curry powder on hand, feel free to use it. If you have an Indian market nearby, you can search the spice aisle for a packaged chana/chhole mix and use that, making sure to follow package instructions. Or you could make your own blend – I previously shared a nice spice mix from PPK in this post.

I usually make my own blend, but recently I picked up my first box of packaged spice mix and wanted to give it a try. Regardless of your choice, the instructions that follow will be the same. It’ll taste slightly different, of course, but still great!

To start, soften the onion in a large skillet, with a pinch of salt. Be sure to warm your pan first, then add the oil, then add the onions.

Next, Add the garlic and ginger (if using) and mix well, cooking over medium about a minute.

Now add the spices and toss well to coat:

Add the can of tomatoes, partially drained, and increase heat:

Add the chickpeas:

I used chickpeas that I’d prepared from dry. If you’re using canned, you’ll want two cans, drained and rinsed. If from a can, expect your chickpeas to be a little softer.

Add the can of coconut milk and mix well to thoroughly incorporate.

Let simmer on medium-high for about 10 minutes to reduce and thicken.

Add salt to taste. Start with a half of a teaspoon and go up in quarter-teaspoon increments til you get to a place you like. Taste, taste, taste!!

Add the juice of a whole lemon or, if you have it on hand, the chaat masala. It’s a blend of salts and spices that will give your dish a tangy taste. Ingredients are listed below to the right:

If you find you need a little sweetness, add in a bit of agave nectar. You could also use a teaspoon of organic sugar or coconut palm sugar. Again, very flexible!

For a little something extra, add chopped fenugreek (fresh methi leaves) or chopped cilantro.

Play around with the finished dish adding this or that to your taste: a little more salt, sweet, spicy, sour. This is a great way to learn more about your taste and the way flavors play together. Don’t be afraid to be a little adventurous.

This dish keeps very well in the fridge for about a week. Some say it even tastes better the next day!

Instructions re-cap (so easy!!):

• Warm the pan
• Warm the oil
• Add onions and a pinch of salt
• Soften/brown the onions (about 10 minutes)
• Add the garlic and ginger
• Add the spices, stir to coat onions
• Add the tomatoes
• Add the chickpeas
• Add the can of coconut milk
• Simmer 10mins to thicken
• Add salt, taste for salt
• Add the lemon or chaat masala
• Taste of salty, sweet, spicy, sour and adjust as needed by adding more salt, sugar or agave, cayenne or red pepper flakes, lemon, etc.
• Optional: add fresh fenugreek leaves or cilantro

Serve on rice! Play a board game! Be happy.

I use math a lot in my daily life. I’ve managed complicated budgets for several businesses (including my current job) and have been doing my own taxes (accurately!) for over a decade. Most of the time I’m in the grocery store I’m running numbers, determining sale prices, calculating total costs. Same goes for the kitchen — frequently I’m altering recipes, which requires an ability to do conversions on the fly.

Yet, when I saw that this exercise was about “numbers and math”, I froze. Numbers and math! It must be some basic, primal fear coming out. I’m glad I didn’t let it stop me:

Not so scary!

In the extra credit, Zed asks us to go back and comment out each line, explaining what is happening:

The only thing that tripped me up was modulus. In Zed’s words: “Another way to say it is, ‘X divided by Y with J remaining.’ For example, ‘100 divided by 16 with 4 remaining.’ The result of % is the J part, or the remaining part.” Okay.

He also has us start Python and use it as a calculator. I didn’t do anything too fancy:

Next up, he has us write another little .py file that does some math. I couldn’t figure out anything I needed to determine, so I just made something up.

I counted some hypothetical fruit. I’m looking forward to covering variables because I think it would have made my little example easier to write.

Finally, he stressed the importance of using “floating numbers” so I went back and re-wrote my little program to use them. Accuracy wasn’t an issue with this example, but it might be in the future, so floating point numbers seem like a good idea.

For today’s cooking basics lesson, I’m covering caramelized onions. Yesterday I made a pot of my favorite fordhook lima beans. The secret to their deliciousness is a generous base of caramelized onions.

Caramelizing means cooking over low-ish heat for a long time in order to brown the naturally-occurring sugars in the onions. The formerly pearly-white cubes are transformed into a rich golden-brown (or deeper!) color with a rich, savory-sweet flavor.

Start by uniformly chopping onions. A lot of folks go for long thin slices, but I wanted cubes. The small pieces look better than strands in the finished dish.

Warm or melt your fat of choice over medium heat. I used Earth Balance margarine, but you could also use coconut oil or olive oil.

Add the onions.

Stir to thoroughly coat onions with fat.

After 10 minutes on medium heat. Use a stiff, well-made spatula to scrape up the bits of browning goodness.

After 20 minutes on medium heat.

Scrape scrape. After thirty minutes on medium. I turned it down to medium low.

Forty minutes…

One hour.

What a difference a little time and heat makes! I did not add any salt, sugar, or liquids to enhance the caramelization process.

If you’re making a soup or a pot of beans, at this point you simply add other ingredients and simmer until fully cooked. As I mentioned above, I used fordhook lima beans and simmered them until the broth formed a kind of rich oniony gravy. A perfect dinner!

Exercise two is about comments. I already knew how to comment out code, so this was an easy one.

Zed explains that comments are important because they give you a way to explain, in plain English, what something does. Comments help future readers of your code understand what’s going on. They also permit you to disable parts of your program if you need to.

Comments in Python use the hash character (#, octothorpe), but today I learned that other languages use other symbols. I noticed this while reading Erik Dietrich’s post “Rapid Fire Craftsmanship Tips“. He gives a very specific example of when a certain type of comment is not so helpful.

Taking time to document what I’m doing helps with the learning process — it makes things “stick”. This is exactly why Zed often suggests that we go back and write comments around seemingly easy exercises. It can feel tedious, but I still do it.

In related news, “Very” Early Bird tickets for PyTennessee opened today and I got one! $50 for an earlybird ticket for a two-day conference is a steal, especially if I can find a couch to sleep on for the weekend. Hopefully I’ll be pretty far along in my journey by next February and will learn a lot from the experience.

Today is October first and in the spirit of my favorite month of the year I want to share one of my favorite recipes: chole (chana) masala. It’s one I love to make for crowds and dinner parties because it always pleases. I also enjoy preparing it for sick friends as it keeps exceptionally well, actually improving the longer it sits in the fridge (up to a point!). It is a variation of the recipe shared here. Let me know if you have any questions.Ingredients:

• 1/4 cup coconut oil (unrefined works)
• 1 very large yellow onion, thinly sliced (sweet onions also work — I’ve had great luck with giant vidalias)
• 1 small jalapeno or other hot pepper, seeded and minced (wear gloves!)
• 1 1/2 heaping tablespoons minced fresh garlic
• 1 heaping tablespoon minced fresh ginger
• 1/4 – 1/3 cup finely chopped fresh cilantro (omit if averse)
• 2 28 oz cans diced organic tomatoes in juice, undrained (no basil or seasonings added)
• 1/2 teaspoons salt (add more to taste if your tomatoes are unsalted, but most are salted)
• 3 1/2 – 4 cups cooked chickpeas
• 1 tablespoon agave nectar
• Juice of one small lime or 2 teaspoons tamarind concentrate
• 1/2 cup coconut cream
• Post Punk Kitchen spice blend
  • 1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon ground cumin
  • 1 tablespoon ground coriander
  • 1 teaspoon ground turmeric
  • 1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds, chopped
  • 1/2 teaspoon cardamom
  • 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground cayenne (add more or less to taste)

Please note that in this and any recipe, it’s incredibly important to use fresh, fragrant spices for the best-possible dish. I’ll cover proper storage of spices in a later post, but for now: if your spices smell like sawdust, they’ll probably taste that way, too. Toss ’em and invest in something new.

Instructions:

Preheat one of your largest pans or pots over medium heat. I use a large, heavy-bottomed pan because I have one and it helps the tomatoes cook down faster, but if you don’t, you can use a large pot.

Make your spice blend by combining spices in a bowl and whisking with a fork or small whisk.

When the pan is hot, add coconut oil. Allow it to warm. Add the onion (you should hear it sizzle) and cook about ten minutes. Onion will become soft and golden, and depending on how hot your pan is, may brown some. You may elect to leave the onions mostly undisturbed, or give them a good toss every few minutes or so. Just don’t burn them!

After about ten minutes, add the hot pepper, garlic, and ginger all at once, and stir constantly for about 30 seconds to a minute. Add the spice blend and stir constantly for about another minute. Make sure the onion-pepper-garlic-ginger mixture is thoroughly coated.

Add the tomatoes and mix well, scraping the bottom of the pan to get all that sauteed goodness. Add salt and chickpeas. Cover the pan and raise heat to medium-high, but once it has reached a strong simmer, uncover. Reduce heat to medium. Allow to simmer enthusiastically for about twenty minutes, stirring every few minutes or so. Be mindful of the heat – you don’t want anything to burn. The point is to get the tomatoes to cook down so that the dish is thick and saucy rather than watery.

Once it’s reached a good consistency, stir in about a half a cup of coconut cream. You can use more. Creaminess is wonderfulness.

Adding my secret ingredient – the coconut cream!

Adding the tamarind

Add the lime or tamarind and agave nectar. Taste for seasonings and adjust as necessary. Add cilantro if using. Remove from heat and allow to sit for about ten minutes.
Serve!

Thanks to Isa and Terry at the Post Punk Kitchen for inspiring me with this recipe.