Chickpea polenta, white fish with sauce vierge, poached egg

Garbanzo beans, chickpeas, the dried kind that come in a bag or from the bulk bins. Also sold in cans all over the place. They're unavoidable. Used the world over, by friends and enemies alike. A powerhouse of a legume there. Apparently. We used to have a housekeeper who put them in everything. This turned my impressionable formative mind against them because to my thinking they had no business in my salad. But I have since matured and changed that childish opinion.

I would have liked to mill them into flour but they're too large for the slots of the Nutrimill. I thought of smashing them with a hammer and putting the broken bits into the feeder. Instead, I replaced the new coffee grinder that wore out from undisciplined abusive overuse with another new coffee grinder. They're so cheap on Amazon, we could go on like this forever. Now the New new grinder turned those hard garbanzos into dust in no time flat. No need at all to drag out the mill.

* 3/4 cup water
* 3/4 cup chicken broth
* [into that, the herbs that I have that seemed good to use. Fresh tarragon, bay, and sage leaves. They were added to the liquid, boiled for awhile, when they filled the kitchen with their scent, they were removed and discarded. It would have made a fine if thin soup right there. ]
* 3/4 cup chickpea flour
* 2 tablespoons olive oil
* 1 tablespoon tahini
* 1 tablespoon honey
* 1 smashed/diced garlic clove
* 1/50th teaspoon s/p/c house mix, where c=cayenne. Possibly 1/20th, it's hard to tell.

Boil the liquid. Add everything. Stand back because it quickly becomes volcanic. Hardly no cooking required at all, actually.

It totally works. This was fun to watch come together. It's easy to imagine it flavored otherwise.

Smeared in a thin layer all over a plate.

* fish and vierge sauce held over from yesterday's lunch
* egg poached in acidified salted water, the extra giggly albumen trimmed around the edges of a slotted spoon.

Chickpeas are not grains but they are seeds and grains are seeds too. Here's how I see it.




So no, chickpeas are not grain. Or are they? You know these botanical classifications are entirely arbitrary anyway -- divisions made in accordance to somebody else's thinking, and that change as the thinking changes, with no concern at all to my own thoughts and efforts about developing grain-less New American Breakfasts, so ordered to help counter the problem of overweightedness which is broadly acknowledged as a national pandemic. Pandemic. How's that for hyperbole? Obesity is not even an actual illness. Still, anyone whose been to a public pool, or a VFW picnic, or a bingo parlor, or a fourth of July BBQ, or even a gay bathhouse where one could see more fat flabby gelatinous asses than on BBW bathing suit runway and where one could reasonably expect at the very least a modicum of vanity, let's just say anywhere and everywhere, could confirm that it's a problem that needs addressing.

Okay, so I might have exaggerated there a little bit again. The point I'm getting at is maybe we should leave off the chickpeas, I don't know. I think they're actually healthy.

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