Chickpea Soup

     I wasn't going to cook this past weekend.  I was going to take the easy route for lunch this week and throw a frozen veggie burger into my bag.  But then I watched the Food Network for about 7 minutes on Sunday morning and found my crock pot calling my name.  The show I watched featured a recipe for Pureed Chickpea Soup.  It had pancetta, which I didn't have or want to use.  I also did a lot of modifying.  For one thing, the bag of dried chickpeas said that they had to be soaked overnight.  What the heck does that mean exactly?  I guess my experience teaching math and the strive to use precise math language has me analyzing the language on the packaging of the ingredients in the kitchen.  But overnight is so open ended and what if I wanted to soak my chickpeas during the day, how long should they be in water?  I ended up soaking them for about 7 hours, figuring if I had gone to bed at 11pm and got up at 6am, that would have been overnight.  After soaking the chickpeas, I threw the following ingredients into the crockpot, turned it on low, and went to bed.

Ingredients
1/2 pound dried chickpeas (soaked)
1 cup celery
1 cup carrots
1/2 cup leeks
pinch of crushed red pepper
1 tsp rosemary
1 tsp thyme
1 tsp salt
6 cups water

I wasn't really sure what to expect since I had never heard of chickpea soup before and the recipe I referenced didn't even use the crockpot.  But I woke up early enough to pull out the immersion blender and was pleasantly surprised with the results.  Since it was 5:45 when I was blending, I found the texture of the soup a bit lumpy at lunch time but I think that worked for this soup.  I'd say it's a keeper.  You could probably even experiment with adding other vegetable and spices.  The recipe also had directions for making croutons, which sounded delicious.