Recently I have spent a lot of time devising recipes for our pies. For years I have devoured cookbooks and food magazines, but I have always been a fairly casual cook - a bit of this, a dash of that. Now I have to be really precise, measuring and recording everything so that I can duplicate the recipes again and again.

So this weekend I started working on the recipe for our Moroccan Chickpea pie. With about ten different cookbooks spread out on my desk I started pondering chickpeas...I tend to buy canned chickpeas because they are so easy to use, but I am also drawn to the bulk section of any grocery store, and dried chickpeas do look so wholesome and cheerful. I did a quick search on dried versus canned chickpeas, and was blown away by The Hummus Blog. Did you know that canned chickpea's contain 52% more sodium than dried? Plus, canned chickpeas provide you with 48% less Iron, 42% less Copper, about 30% less Magnesium, Phosphors and Potassium and 10-25% less Zinc, Calcium and Selenium! Holy smokes, who knew? So thanks to the Hummus Blog, I decided right then and there to create the PPC recipe using dried chickpeas. Pretty soon I had a pot of chickpeas simmering away with some ginger and cinnamon, filling the house with amazing aromas.