Syrian-Inspired Lazy Girl Chickpeas and Rice

This quick and easy recipe helps you keep your cool in the hot, hot heat of summer.

My beloved husband teaches high school history for a living, so for us summer means travel. For me, it also means something a little more personal: getting a hold on my own ambition.

Sometimes it seems as if Americans enshrine ambition over most things. Although the canard goes that no one ever regrets not working more when they’re on their deathbed, they might regret it in old age, as an ever-precarious Social Security system and lack of affordable healthcare means that most of us are thoroughly on our own when it comes to keeping soul and body. Work is a virtue because it’s a necessity. Without it, we cannot survive.

Still, even for the most Calvinist among us, it’s hard to accomplish anything meaningful in the summer heat. This is true in life and in the kitchen, where the idea of laboring over a hot stove sounds anything but appealing. For this week’s recipe, I offer a reminder that it’s okay to pause, reflect, and have a simple supper with the people we love without spending too much time sweating over a hot stove.

Fast days, slow company

I’ve always been someone who prides herself in doing the most. Choosing an unconventional career means that hustling is my middle name. I wake up early and stay up late so I can make enough money to sustain our household, maintain my fiction-writing, and be a full-time parent to my toddler and 3-year-old. I’m pretty much always working, and I generally like it.

But in the summertime, all that goes out the window. My husband is around all day, and so is the temptation to just hang out with my favorite people in the world. I’m still staying on top of work deadlines, yes, but I’ve stopped working on my novel, stopped trying to wrangle new clients (even though the writing world has been slow for everyone I know), to stop pushing the rock up the hill for a moment and just be.

That feeling of laissez faire acceptance extends to the kitchen as well. My ambition in the kitchen is a cause of both joy and exasperation in our household. Pre-kids, my husband and I would often eat elaborate three-course weekend dinners at 10 p.m. These days, multi-dish meals from around the world leave him with a mountain of dishes that keep him up almost as late washing while I put the kids down.

Not so in the summer. Heat forces me to pare things down, stick to the basics, and get the cooking done quickly so I have enough time to work before and after we all spend the day in adventure together. That’s when I reach for an old family staple: Syrian chickpeas and rice.

Chickpeas and rice: a simple summer simmer

My dad’s family are Syrian jews, and when he and my mom got together my great grandmother made the trip all the way out to Los Angeles to teach her how to cook all the traditional recipes — never mind that my dad was the one who did all the cooking in the relationship at the time!

Growing up, these classic recipes were enshrined in family lore and weeknight practices. Most of the ones we turned to again and again were sourced from Deal Delights, a crowd-sourced cookbook made by the Syrian Jewish Women’s League of a New Jersey town sometime in the 1950s. The recipes are just what you’d imagine given the source: quick, cheap, and tasty, with short lists of ingredients and straightforward methodologies. The kind of food designed to be slapped together in the brief intervals between picking someone up from school and dropping someone else off at swim practice.

But of all the recipes in Deal Delights, there was perhaps none more beloved than those that combined legumes and rice. As a kid, I thought they were tasty. As a mom, I really get it. There’s nothing better on a busy weeknight when you’re juggling Zoom calls and toddler dance parties than a meal that takes 10 minutes to make and costs less than $5. You do have to turn on the stove (sorry!), but otherwise it’s the perfect summer meal.

You can dress it up (my overachieving mother would usually pair her chickpeas and rice with a spinach or zucchini pie; my aunt with a roast chicken or two) or keep it simple with a green salad like I do. However you handle it, chickpeas and rice hit the spot every time. I’ll try to consider it a warm-weather reminder to slow down and let summer do its thing, savoring the long, aimless afternoons.

Emily Beyda’s writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Built, Refinery29, Smartmouth, Fodors, the Thrillist, the Austin Chronicle, and more. Her novel, “The Body Double,” was published in 2021.

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