Amaranth Chickpea

This recipe may well be at the very optimum of nutrition, taste, ease of cooking and affordability. I love it so much.

Get from a bulk food store

Amaranth

Like quinoa but more fine-grained, cheaper and more nutritious. Nutrition is often lost when a cultivar is bred to be bigger. I figure amaranth must be some older breed, wilder or perhaps more intensively selected for nutrition in times that needed it. I always feel strong after eating amaranth, that is to say, I feel less averse towards activity that may tear my muscles and demand material for repair; its proteins must be pretty high quality.

Dried ChickPeas

Dried ChickPeas are cheaper than canned, and they work out to have a tasty chewy skin that I can't imagine canned chickpeas would retain in cooking. Hmm are they cheaper than canned? That is not evident when comparing cost per weight, but I guess when you buy canned you're paying for a lot of water. I should investigate.

Sesame Seed

Get lots of it. I was told to get unhulled sesame seed, it is quite delicious, though I haven't tried many different kinds.

Optional additional bean

It's good to mix things up and bring in guest beans to complement the chickpeas. I always welcome the presence of adzuki beans (what sweetened japanese red bean paste is made of).

Flavor options

Massel stock: Massel stocks are pretty great. Note, vegans, the "chicken" one is vegan, you're allowed to have it.

Soy sauce: Does fine too. Don't use too much.

Shiitake mushrooms: You can buy these dried from any asian supermarket. I love them a lot. Don't get ones that're too large, imo. Their flavor is in the spores, and once these ghosts of the log grow too large, they let their spores away.

Garnish, chili oil: If you've never had Lao Gan Ma, you might want to check it out, but as a veteran I find that I tire of its very high MSG content. There's nothing unhealthy about MSG, it just seems like a cheap trick, it's not a flavor I appreciate so much any more. I tend to adore any jar of chili oil that comes with mushrooms in it. Additionally, it may be worth learning to make sichuan oil. I haven't been able to find sichuan oil for sale anywhere, oddly, so if you want it you'll have to source some sichuan peppercorns and make it yourself.

Tools

Electric Pressure Cooker

An Instant Pot or a Crockpot Express or something like these. They're great devices. They can do all sorts of things quickly and automatically, but I mainly use mine for cooking beans and making rice. I have on occasion used it for raising dough. It should be considered for stews. It can also be used for making yogurt.

Instructions

Soak the dried chickpeas over night

I drain and wash the chickpeas but I'm not sure why. Something told me to once. Maybe there's nothing wrong with cooking the chickpeas in chickpea water though. I'll look into it.

Put the chickpeas into the pot

Add enough amaranth, given that amaranth is Good To Eat but also knowing that if you add too much the meal will be slimy.

Add more sesame seeds than you would usually eat, they're not just a garnish, they're food, they're crunchy, they're delicious, they contain amino acids that complete the protein in the chickpeas (hence why hummus is a thing (the tahini in hummus is just ground sesame seeds)). If you're not getting them at a price where you feel you can afford to do that you might be paying too much.

Add your flavorings

Add enough water to cover the chickpeas and then go about 4mm higher. Water doesn't boil off from electric pressures while you cook, it uses all of it, so you need much less water than you would if you were cooking it in a pot.

Set it to cook on whatever pressure the crockpot express calls "high" for 25 minutes

Eat as much of that as you want, lift, go jogging