Oh, garbanzo beans!

Perhaps I am cheating, using an email to a friend as my first post, but by way of getting started, here it is.

Sunday I woke right up at 8 with nothing on my mind but chickpeas. Yes, garbanzos. Do you know how much I love i ceci? I eat them at least 6 days a week in one form or another, and I have recently discovered the shocking difference between dried & soaked overnight vs. canned. I'm into beans in general, actually... and I recently ordered $35 worth of heirloom variety beans from an independent farm in California. (I'm still a little embarrassed about this, but looking oh-so-forward to their arrival.)

Ok, tangent over. I woke up at 8 on Sunday, leapt out of bed, and ran to the kitchen to start my chick peas a-soaking. They need about 8 hours and I had neglected to think of Sunday's dinner on Saturday, as there was a boy and a baseball game distracting me. Anyway, I did go back to bed after I put the beans in a pot, and the rest of the day was fair to middlin'. Took a walk, drank some coffee. Adam got a call around noon and had to go into work (ugh) so it was just us girls in front of the What Not to Wear marathon. But on our walk, we stopped at Trader Joe's and the at Whole Foods in search of semolina flour so I could make... (waaait for it!) pasta from scratch! Admittedly it was not the egg pasta one envisions when 'homemade pasta' is mentioned, but it was orecchiette, the little semolina based ear-shaped (orecchio = ear, -ette = little) beauties. They turned out a little chewy because I followed the directions in Gourmet over my own instincts, so they were too big to dry in an hour, but they were tasty and I made them myself. My roommates liked them, and I had no need for my backup box of dried orecchiette. Alas, my camera battery pooped out on me so I didn't get any pictures, but it was a fun way to spend an afternoon/evening, and it didn't take as long as some of my previous Sunday cooking adventures, so we managed to eat before 9:45!