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05/24/09 - Deep Fried Chick Peas With Wilted Greens

We promised people we'd put this recipe on our web site. (We grabbed it from Tom Douglas's cookbook, Big Dinners, if you want to check out some of his other great recipes.) This recipe is simple, but you'll have to do some deep frying. We use one of those electric deep fryers, but you can just use a deep pot. You want a deep pot so the oil doesn't spatter as much, and you can get enough oil into it to cover the chick peas when you fry them. You will also want a slotted spoon so you can get things out of the hot oil.

For the recipe, you will need:

  • a pint or so of olive oil
  • eight cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
  • two cans of chick peas - pour off the liquid in the can and dry them a bit with a paper towel for less spattering
  • salt and black pepper
  • about a pound of escarole, mixed greens, kale, lettuce, seaweed or such
Heat the olive oil to about 350F. An electric deep fryer will do this automatically. Alternatively, you can use a thermometer. If you don't have a thermometer, just keep an eye on the oil so that it doesn't start to smoke.

Deep fry the garlic slices for maybe 30 seconds, until they turn golden. This cooks the garlic and flavors the oil.

Deep fry the chick peas a handful at a time. Give them about two minutes. They'll turn golden brown and shrink. Remove them from the oil and let them cool on a paper towel. Keep deep frying batches until they're all deep fried.

Heat two or three tablespoons of the deep frying oil in a pan. Clean the greens and toss them all in. Toss them around a bit until they wilt. You want to cook them as little as you can, but the cooking time will depend on what you are cooking.

Serve the chick peas and garlic on top of the cooked greens. How's that?

This is another Kaleberg Photoshop hash. Once again, our photographer fell behind the ravening hordes, so we had to cut and paste to make it look like we still had a full dish.

Keywords: recipe, kale