The original recipe came out of a cookbook called 366 Delicious Ways to Cook Rice, Beans, and Grains.
HERE'S ALL IT TAKES
Serves 4
- 2 cups vegetable broth or water
- 1 cup uncooked long grain rice
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 3 tablespoons onion, minced
- 2 garlic cloves, minced
- 1 teaspoon ground cumin
- 1 1/2 cups canned diced tomatoes with juice
- 1 1/2 cups cooked chickpeas with liquid or 1 (14.5 ounce) canned chickpeas
- 1/4 teaspoon paprika
- 1 tablespoon chopped fresh cilantro
- salt & fresh ground pepper to taste
In a small pan, bring the broth to a boil, pour in the rice, cover with lid and REDUCE heat to low and simmer. Cook until rice has absorbed water, 12 to 15 minutes. Remove from heat, do not fluff until ready to serve.
In a medium saucepan over medium heat, heat the olive oil. Add the onion, garlic, and cumin, and saute until fragrant, about 2 minutes. Add the tomatoes, cooked chickpeas, paprika, and cilantro, and reduce the heat to low. Let simmer for 20-30 minutes; the longer it cooks the more the tomatoes break down and create a delicious sauce. If there's not enough liquid to make a sauce, add 1 1/2 cups of broth.
To serve, make a bed of the cooked rice on a serving platter. Spoon the chickpea mixture with cooking liquid onto the center of the rice and serve at once.
COOK’S NOTES
I had a bag of dried garbanzo beans and cooked the chickpeas in the pressure cooker FIRST, THEN used the extra chickpea broth to cook the rice.
Do not skip the paprika seasoning in this recipe. If not on hand, use a good chili powder.
And that 1 tablespoon of fresh cilantro really brightens this dish. It's the perfect amount and I wouldn't leave it out. However, if i didn't have cilantro on hand, parsley would work too.
Jill!
Glad to see you showing how to cook the garbanzo beans in the pressure cooker – It is such a big difference between that and the canned version.
Cheers!
gabi @ mamaliga.
Hi Gabi!
So nice to meet you. I just came from your delicious foodblog. I completely agree with about the garbanzo beans. They have so much more flavor when I cook them. I keep a can in the pantry just for emergencies (it’s been in there a while).
I’ve come to enjoy the bean broth as much as the beans; using it instead of water when I cook rice. It also makes a good chicken broth substitute.
I’m up to using 3 large bay leaves, 1 teaspoon of salt and 5 crushed garlic cloves in the cooking water now. It makes a big delicious difference.
Thanks Jill!
Now, bean broth is something intriguing for me and I will try it with my my next batch of garbanzo beans dish which will be Chef Jose Andres’s “Garbanzos con Espinacas” from NPR [dot] org
Spinach stew that is –
Gabi @ mamaliga
We made this tonight! Great weekday dinner.I didn’t have any fresh cilantro or parsley so I used dried cilantro. We were happy with it. Thanks.
Hi Stacie!
You’re right. This recipe is a great weekday dinner. I wonder about using different flavors of canned tomatoes to spice it up a bit.
I had a few folks ask about the saffron that was in the original recipe.
If you have it on hand, add 1/8 teaspoon crushed saffron threads to the rice, broth and salt when cooking the rice.
David W. from Jerusalem, ISRAEL wrote in with this to say:
“I just read your recipe for chickpeas and rice. This is a variation on a Middle Eastern dish that is popular all over especially in Israel, Syria and Lebanon. In those countries the dish is typically made with some kind of white bean, like a lima bean or similar but maybe smaller. As to your comment about the saffron, in the Middle East that is a common enough spice, but not in America. You could add about 1/2 tsp. of turmeric to get the color effect and avoid the high cost of saffron.”
Thank you David!