You can tell this is an old recipe as it gives directions to soak the chickpeas overnight. Of course you can still do that, but it’s much easier now to just buy tinned chickpeas. It makes the recipe a lot quicker and easier to make as you can cut out the first couple of steps and go straight to frying the onions, garlic and pepper.
It used to be quite hard to find recipes that catered easily for vegetarian guests, luckily that’s no longer the case. Years ago I remember searching for an interesting dish to serve my son’s girlfriend for a Christmas lunch dominated by roast pork and turkey. The answer I finally came up with was a stuffed eggplant, don’t think it was quite as spicy as this recipe though. Fortunately she seemed to enjoy it.
When I was growing up cabbage was sliced and boiled and came out quite tasteless. As a result I’m always looking for new ways to cook it, to make it more interesting. The obvious way is to add butter and while that tastes great, dietary wise it’s not such a good idea for some of us. So finding this cutting has been inspiring, there’s some great ideas on it.
The Portugese are fond of potatoes and cabbage, but they’re served separately, which is how I usually serve them. Potato and onion gratin is quite common, but this is the first time I’ve seen cabbage added into the mix. I think it would go well with a steak or roast meat.
Instead of making the pastry case as described in this recipe you could make it as a regular pie or flan. You could even make it without pastry at all by just lightly greasing a pie plate and covering it with fine, dried breadcrumbs before adding the filling. Whichever way you make it the Mediterranean flavors make it a great lunch dish.
I can’t decide if these are pancakes or patties as there doesn’t seem enough flour in them to make them pancakes. Don’t really think it matters though as it still a great way to eat vegetables.
This recipe is for those who have a thriving vegetable patch and at crop of zucchinis about to ripen – every summer back in the 70s that was certainly the case. Although I’m not sure it is now. Back then there were plenty of slice and cake recipes to use them up and pickling them to serve with salads was another idea. If you haven’t got the homegrown variety this recipe only uses a kilogram so it wouldn’t be too expensive to buy them.
