Chickpea, Celery Salad & Miso Soup

This is a really yummy dinner you can pull together in 20 minutes. Let’s start with the salad.

Serves: 2-3

What you need:

1 can of chickpeas, or an equivalent amount that you’ve soaked overnight and boiled

4 stalks of lettuce; sliced into 1″ pieces

1/4 red onion; chopped

1 tsp lemon; zested

1 tsp of ginger; grated

1/2-1 cup of mint; chopped (depends on how much you like mint)

2 cups of spinach

oil for frying

salt & pepper to taste

1 tblsp of yogurt tehina

sumac to sprinkle

How to do it:

On low heat, fry the chickpeas with oil for a few minutes, making sure not to let the chickpeas burn. After a minute or two, add the celery and a little more oil, if necessary.

After about ten minutes, add the salt, pepper, lemon and ginger. Saute together for another five minutes, or so, and then throw in the onion. Lay a bed of spinach on a plate and pour a generous amount of the chickpea & celery salad on top of the spinach. Top it off with a dollop of yogurt tehina and sprinkle some sumac all around. Enjoy!

Miso Soup

This was a simple miso soup to prepare and came together really fast when we were rushing to make dinner the other night. We used an organic miso paste from barley primarily because everything else is the specialty Asian store here had MSG. If you can find it without though, go ahead and substitute any miso paste with the barley one we used.

Serves: 4-6

What you need:

4 tblsp miso paste (this is really to your taste though)

8 cups water

3 oz firm tofu; chopped into cubes

1 green onion; sliced into coin slivers

1/3 c cilantro (you could use parsley if you hate cilantro)

2 cups egg noodles

1 tblsp soy sauce

4 mushrooms; sliced thinly

1/4 yellow onion; sliced thinly

How to do it:

Bring water to a boil and cook the egg noodles for three or four minutes with salt. Drain and run cold water over them to stop them from cooking further. Set aside.

Bring water to a boil, reduce it to a simmer and take it off of the burner. In a small bowl, pour about 1 cup of water and mix in your miso paste, stirring gently to incorporate all the clumps. But your pot back on the heat, stir the miso & hot water into the pot and add your tofu, onions and mushrooms. Let cook for a minute and then remove from the heat. Add the soy sauce and salt (if it needs it) and let it sit for a minute. Put noodles into the bottom of several bowls and pour the miso, tofu, mushrooms and onions over the noodles. Enjoy!