Chickpea & Spinach Wonton Cups

One of my life philosophies is always have some sort of boozey beverage while cooking. More than likely my choice is wine, but there are times when cravings for other types hit. I’ve honestly been trying to cutback on the booze consumption (I know ridiculous) but I really don’t like to cook or write without it. One without the other is like peanut butter without chocolate, it’s enjoyable but you know your missing something extra sweet to make it perfect.

I have temporarily deemed Wednesday as my cooking night. It just seems right for now, perhaps because I came up with a plan for what to cook last night and I had nothing else to do on this Wednesday night. I hadpretty much everything I needed to make the dish I thought of. A few ingredients that would add to the dish were really unnecessary and I reallydidn’t want to mess with going to the store. However, today I wanted a beer, I hadn’t even started cooking and a nice cold beer was calling my name. I had to have it. Ignoring the craving and distracting myself to avoid going to the store solely for beer wasn’t working so well. Luckily, I realized I didn’t have enough frozen spinach to make my dish, so off to the store I went – beer at the top of my list. Priorities right? On the way to the store I decided to makesome cookies that I had recently found the recipe for. No problem just needed a few additional ingredients. Keep in mind I hate going to the store without a plan – so I screwed that one up for myself from the get-go. When arriving backat home I realized I missed a few key ingredients for the cookies. Thankfully, my wonderful new roommate had everything I was missing! 

I cracked open a beer and began working on the idea that had been bouncing around in my head all day. 

Chickpea & Spinach Wonton Cups

12 wonton wrappers (or however many you want to make)

½ chopped yellow onion

1 clove garlic

3 slivers ginger - minced

½ cup dried chickpeas (you can of course use canned)

1 cup frozen chopped spinach (thawed)

½ cup diced tomatoes

Spices to taste*:

Garam Masala

Curry powder

Tumeric

Pepper

*I’m trying to get better at providing accurate measurements but it’s hard because I really hate cooking by measuring everything. I can’texplain it – just one of those things.

Dried Chickpeas: To prepare the dried chickpeas soak them in water for 8 hours then drain them. Place them in a medium pot with water. Bringthe water to a boil and then let the chickpeas simmer on medium heat for about an hour. I soaked my chickpeas while at work, cooked them first and let them sit with the frozen (thawing) spinach while I prepped everything else.

Wontons: Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees. Get out some muffin tins and spray them with cooking oil (or some other oily/buttery product) to prevent sticking. Place one wonton wrapper in each muffin cup. Gently pressthem so that the bottom is pressed against the bottom and the other parts arerelatively standing up against the sides of the muffin cup. Pre-cook these inthe oven for 8 minutes until the ends are slightly brown. While these arecooking you can make the filling. Once cooked, remove and let cool.

Filling: Pour about ½ tablespoon of olive oil into a pan and toss in the chopped onion. Cook until fragrant and slightly translucent. Add garlic and cook for a few more minutes. Add the chickpeas, spinach and tomatoes. Add in the spices. I suppose the spices should have gone in with the garlic, but I was preoccupied so they went in after. Cook for a bit more and taste every now and then so you get the flavor you want. To finish it off squeeze half a lemon over the filling. A good trick when doing this is to turn the lemon half upside down in your hand (rind down, insides up) – this helps prevent seeds from getting into everything.

The wonton cups should still be sitting in the muffin tins. Fill the wonton cups with the filling and put in the oven for about 10 minuteslonger, or until the ends of the wontons look brown and crispy.

These turned out pretty good. They could have probably benefited from more of a saucy filling, or cheesy but oh well. They were fun and something I came up with on my own. Considering the fact I also was making cookies at the time, everything turned out pretty darn tasty. The 1^stcooking Wednesday has been a success!

Lessons learned:

-       Makesure you have everything  you need(drinks included) before starting to cook

-        Think about the consistency of what youare making  - like I mentioned thefilling could have been thicker and more cohesive.

-       If you aren’t good at multi-tasking, don’t try to cook two completely differentthings at once.