Food and Cooking

You can sub beans with chickpeas in almost any beans-based recipe and they work really well.

Garlic is mostly used as a seasoning, so it's fine to simply not use it. Depending on the recipe you could sub it with ginger, cumin, pepper sauce, or green onions. (Note: use the green onions as garnish.)

Onion depends a lot on the role in the dish. If it's just adding a bit of flavour, treat it like garlic - not use it, or sub it with another seasoning. If you're using it as a veg you're better off replacing it with another chunkier veg, depending on the dish bell peppers might do the trick.

Anyway. Here's something that I often prepare, I'll adapt the recipe to avoid onions and garlic. It's one pot as long as the chickpeas are already cooked (I bulk cook 1kg of them and freeze each time); if starting with dry chickpeas please take that into account.

• 250g random bits of pork, diced. Leftover porkchops? Bacon? Sausages? Yes.
• already cooked chickpeas. Amount is eyeballed but ~250g of dry chickpeas.
• 1 cup of white, long grain rice
• 1 yellow or red bell pepper; or half green pepper (it tastes strong). Diced small.
• random broth or plain water
• seasoning: brown sugar, paprika, salt, grated ginger, curry powder, and acid (vinegar or lime juice)
• [garnish] green onions
• some veg oil

1. Rub brown sugar, paprika, and salt on the diced pork (go easy on this if it's bacon). Then use the veg oil to brown it on the outside, on high fire. Make sure to brown it well, the sugar isn't there for sweetness, but for a caramel taste.
2. Wash the rice and add it to the pot, alongside the ginger. Let it "fry" a bit in the oil alongside the pork.
3. Add already cooked chickpeas (including their cooking water), the bell pepper, curry powder, and the acid. Add broth/water as you deem necessary, and correct the salt. Low fire, keep it barely simmering, until the rice is cooked.
4. When the rece is cooked, garnish it with green onions and enjoy.