Curried Chickpea Soup, Fresh Spring Rolls and Sushi Rice Balls.

After posting about my favorite holiday gift, those bags of Lompoc beans, I was inspired this weekend to make a large batch of chickpeas.
I will admit that the kind of cooking I do does require some forethought and planning.
I never thought about it much until my SIL asked about timing for meals. She was referring to the timing required to put all dishes of a meal out at the same time.
It got me to thinking, I realized that I very rarely decide what's for dinner a hour before I want/need to serve the meal. I think and plan several days ahead, that allows me to use dried beans and make my own sauces etc... I go to the farmer's market and grocery store once a week usually, so I need to have a vague plan for several meals when I shop.

Back to the beans, I rinsed and soaked them Friday night, cooked them in the slow cooker on Saturday. I froze some in bags and stowed 4 cups in the fridge for later.

Sunday, I made my favorite curried chickpea soup, delicious with a dollop of plain yogurt.
Later this week I will use the rest to make hummus.

I love making enough of whatever I make to have leftovers for lunch and subsequent dinners.
Several hours of food prep = two or three meals !!

To this end, I made sushi rice balls, using the sushi rice recipe from my roll your own sushi post.
I just add some black sesame seeds and a bit of sea salt.

For salad I went with fresh spring rolls. We had Thai food recently and that inspired me. I filled them with grated carrots, shredded cabbage, baked tofu, avocado and fresh cilantro.
If they seem like too much work you can toss all the same ingredients into a salad bowl or make my Asian slaw.

My easy peanut sauce is great with the spring rolls, sushi rice balls or as a salad dressing if you go that way.

We had all three items for dinner last night. Lunch today included the spring rolls and the rice balls. Tomorrow will be another chickpea soup dinner !!