Night in Tunisia

Recipe for Lablabi

Here is a recipe for Lablabi that I found online at the Congo Cookbook
of African recipies. (http://www.congocookbook.com). Go ahead and try
it if you like. Ours had hard-boiled eggs in it too, which I highly
recomend. I'd suggest if you want to party that you prepare this in a
crock pot and keep it warm before you go out ;) Just don't throw the
bread in until you're almost ready to eat it.

Lablabi (Tunisian Chickpea Soup)

Chick peas, day-old bread, lemon juice, and olive oil (and harissa,
Tunisia's famous hot sauce) are the basic ingredients needed to make
Lablabi—a soup in Tunisia.

What you need

* two cups dry chick peas (about a pound)
* four to six cloves of garlic, minced
* one tablespoon harissa sauce (from can or jar)
* one tablespoon cumin
* salt, to taste
* juice of one lemon
* six tablespoons olive oil
* a few slices of day-old bread, preferably day-old french bread,
broken into small pieces

What you do

* Wash chick peas and soak them overnight.

* If desired, rinse chick peas. In a large soup pot, cover chick
peas with water, bring to a boil, and cook until tender (ten to twenty
minutes). — Or start with two pounds of canned chick peas, drained and
rinsed, and heated in four cups of water.

* Add garlic, harissa sauce, ground cumin, and salt. Simmer for ten minutes.

* Immediately before serving: add lemon juice, olive oil, and
bread crumbs. Serve hot.

Some cooks add a pinch of bicarbonate of soda (baking soda) to the
water in which the chickpeas soak.

A more traditional method is to start with whole cumin and grind it
immediately before preparing the soup.

The soup can also be served by placing portions of bread crumbs in
each soup bowl, ladling the soup over the bread, and pouring equal
portions of lemon juice and olive oil over the soup. Serve with
additional harissa on the side.

A richer lablabi soup can be made by frying the garlic, some chopped
red onion, a chopped carrot, and some chopped celery in olive oil, and
adding this to the cooked chick peas. Additionally, the chick peas can
be cooked in chicken broth or chicken stock.

Lablabi soup goes well with hard-boiled egg or pan-fried fish.

Enjoy!

posted by tiaraletourneau @ 11:17 a.m.