Cooking: Morrocoan Chicpeas Salad

I got bored with Thousand Island salad dressing, and when chatting with a friend about salad, he reccomend this salad. Turns out that this salad is very much worth the effort. For less than 1 hour, you get a spicy and refreshing salad.

The original recipe can be found in the link section below. Note that I can’t find the red onion, and I ommit the Foccacea. You can also find the picture of my salad in the link section below. For now, I would like to write about the exotic stuff, which contributes to the taste of the salad.

Cumin is popular in Mexican, North African, and Indian cuisine. The spice was formed from Cumin seed, which have a distinctive bitter flavor and strong, warm aroma due to their abundant essential oil content. Their smell can also be detected in the eater’s sweat even after consuming only small amounts. In Jakarta, you can find it in Diamond or Sogo Supermarket. Look at spice section. (Source: Wikipedia)

Feta Cheese is a classic curd cheese in brine whose tradition dates back to Greece thousands of years ago. It is made exclusively from goat’s and sheep’s milk. It give a tangy, salty flavor that can range from mild to sharp. It is one of the ingredients of Greek salad. In Jakarta, you can find it in Sogo Supermarket. Look at diary section. (Source: Wikipedia)

Lemon fruit, cultivated primarily for their juice, though the pulp and rind are also used, primarily in cooking or mixing. Lemon juice is about 5% citric acid, which gives lemons a sour taste. The fruit is available throughout many supermarket in Jakarta. (Source: Wikipedia)

Chilli gave the hot taste to the food. If you like the very hot one, put the chillies witht he seed, like what I did. For the purpose of food presentation, make sure you bought the big chillies in supermarket, not the small one sold in local market.

Garlic has a strong and characteristic odor and an acrid taste, and yields an offensively smelling oil, essence of garlic. (Source: Wikipedia)

Olive Oil is an oil extracted from the fruit of the European olive tree. It is regarded as a healthy dietary oil because of its high content of monounsaturated fat. (Source: Wikipedia)

Ingredients:
6 tbs olive oil
3 garlic cloves, sliced
4 tsp cumin, lightly crushed
2 red chillies, seeded, thinly sliced
1 can chickpeas, drained and rinsed several times
3 tomatoes, halved, seeded and thinly sliced
zest and juice of 1 lemon
1 foccacia (my favourite from Vineth Bakery), substitute with Turkish Bread or Indian Naan
½ pack Feta cheese
1 Cucumber, cut into thin batons (my Lurch Mandolin do it in no time)
½ Red Onion (NOTshallots aka brambang aka bawang merah), thinly sliced
1 cup shredded red cabbage


Directions:
- Put 5 tbs Olive oil in the pan, add garlic, chillies and cumin, temper (warm over medium heat for 10 minutes-don’t burn da thing , especially the garlic. Tempering is an Indian cooking method to release aroma from spices without cooking it.
- Add the chickpeas, warm through (5 mins)
- Add tomatoes, lemon zest and juice, set aside
- Brushed foccacia with remaining oil, grill or pan fried until crisp and golden, tear or cut with bread knife
- Toss remaining vegetable with chickpea mixture, topped with crumbled feta served with foccacia, enjoy with friend, in a porch with a glass of iced tea hmmm

Recipe From http://ariep.multiply.com/recipes/item/1