Moroccan style stew with onion squash, chickpeas and sugarsnap peas

For a change I wanted to combine a squash with more exotic spices, so I came up with this recipe. I want to keep eating seasonal squashes for a long time still, so new ideas are always welcome. In this recipe I used Moroccan style spicing and combined the squash with chickpeas and sugar snap peas. Would Moroccans even use these vegetables? I'm not quite sure, but I have to say that they work with the spices. On the side of the stew I served couscous with almond flakes and a garlicky yogurt sauce to neutralise the spiciness a bit. I liked this dish very much and I'm sure I'll be making similar ones in the future. I also like making a large batch like this, as this is a good dish to take as packed lunch for the next day, or even eat it two days in a row. Feel free to scale the ingredient amounts down, if you don't want to have spare stew or don't have about four eaters.

Ingredients

Stew

100 g dried chickpeas

1 onion squash

240 g sugar snap peas

4 shallots

3 garlic cloves

1 small red chilli

1 tbsp olive oil

2 tsp paprika

1 tsp ginger powder

1 tsp ground cumin

1 tsp ground coriander

1 tsp turmeric

½ tsp cinnamon

½ tsp ras el hanout

500 ml vegetable stock

1 tbsp honey

Couscous

1 cup couscous

50 g almond flakes

½ tsp salt

Yogurt sauce

150 g natural yogurt

1 garlic clove

1 tsp lemon infused olive oil

Method

Soak the chickpeas overnight and boil them in generous amount of water for about one hour. You can also use canned and cooked chickpeas, in that case this step is unnecessary.

Prepare the yogurt sauce. Chop the garlic finely and cook it for a couple of minutes in the lemon infused olive oil, but don't let it get brown. Let the garlic cool and mix it with the yogurt. Now the yogurt can rest in the fridge until serving. Lemon juice can also be added to it to taste before serving.

Then you can start making the stew. Peel the onion squash and remove the seeds. Cut it into cubes.

Cut the sugar snap peas in half. This is an optional step, you can also leave them whole, if you prefer.

Chop the shallots, garlic and chilli finely and cook them in olive oil until soft. I only use a little bit of chilli, but use more, if you like hot food.

Add the spices (paprika, ginger powder, ground cumin, ground coriander, turmeric, cinnamon and ras el hanout) and the vegetable stock to the pan, and then also the squash and chickpeas.

Let simmer slowly under lid for about one hour until the squash is cooked soft. Taste the stew a few times when you go along so that you can adjust the spices according to your own taste. Only when I started cooking more, I started tasting the food as I went along, and that's really necessary to get the taste right. That's also the reason why I'm not always so keen giving amounts for spices here, because I think everyone wants to make the dish to their own taste anyway.

After the simmering, add the honey and the sugar snap peas to the stew and let it simmer for further five minutes. Veganise this dish by leaving the honey and the yogurt sauce out.

In the meanwhile also prepare the couscous. First boil two cups of water and take the pan off heat. Add the couscous, salt and almond flakes to the pan and leave them under the lid for about ten minutes.

Serve the stew, couscous and yogurt sauce together and enjoy!

Your VegHog