Get Yer Grains & Legumes: Chickpeas, Barley, Tomato, Avocado + Bacon Bowl

This post isn't so much about a recipe as an example of how I eat on (very nearly) a daily basis, inspired by a couple of folks and some basic decisions I made a few years ago about how I wanted to eat for the rest of my life - more on this in another post.

Hulled black barley

Just about once per week I cook up a batch of chickpeas (1 cup dry). Drained, they store beautifully, if kept refrigerated, for up to a week. I'll generally do another grain or legume and this week it was black, hulled barley. Black hulled barley tastes the same as regular hulled barley. I don't cook it to the point where it fully opens up, but just prior to that. It's nutty and (I think) delicious - I prefer it over pearled barley in many applications - although beef barley soup is one example where pearled barley tastes great. Pearled barley is polished to remove the outer bran layer. It cooks more quickly and isn't as chewy as hulled (I like the chewy). Hulled barley also keeps well if completely drained and refrigerated for 4-5 days. There are many hot and cold dishes I prepare where I throw in a handful of one or the other - or both.

Everything but the almonds I added as garnish are shown here. While I usually store chickpeas fully drained, yesterday
I cooked some with bay leaf, garlic and a little olive oil and stored them in their cooking water since
I knew I'd be using them within a few days.

Recipe: Chickpeas, Barley, Tomato, Bacon and Avocado Bowl

Tunip and Beet Soup - Pink Food! With Bacon!

...taken with my cell phone - the battery contact problem well known to Canon for years before I bought my Powershot got me.

I am so far behind with posts it's not funny.  Very soon, we'll be celebrating Cinco de Mayo with a Posole post - see? In the mean time, since we've been having a (very) cool, cloudy and rainy spring (for us - I don't want to hear any bitchin' from the NW or wherever your weather's crappy, okay?) a root vegetable soup seemed like a good idea.

I made this soup because I had a bunch of leftover beet scraps from my failed baked beet chip experiment. Failed because while I have awesome knife skills (it's true), I am not (yet) a human mandoline able to cut identical, perfect even slices and the chips were either leathery (too thick), too crispy (too thin - read: burned on the edges) or uneven (leathery on one side, burned on the other). I also had the scraps from three turnips I cubed and roasted - in total about 3/4 cup of leftover diced beets and 1 1/2 to 2 cups of diced turnip. What to do? Make soup.

Oh - I think the golden turnips are referred to as rutabagas. The purple and white turnips are, turnips.

I like beets, but a huge bowl of exclusively beet soup can be a little overwhelming as much as I admire the earthy taste. The turnips do a nice job of mellowing that out a little. Oh and I garnished it with bacon and two of the too-leathery but perfectly good tasting beet chips.  This is very simple but it was very satisfying.

Recipe: Turnip and Beet Soup Garnished with Bacon