Vegan Recipe FAIL - Why it's good to be fallible.

What revithia should look like - stolen photo from Mama's Taverna blog.

Another Greek staple during Lent is Revithia soup, or chickpea soup. I had a delicious homemade version while we were in Greece, and the ingredient list is unbelievably simple, so we decided to try making it. My husband often knows how these things are supposed to taste, but has no idea how to make them. Our usual course of action is to consult the interwebs - where we have oft encountered terrible recipes. We have several Greek cookbooks (written in Greek), so after exhausting the internet, we usually sit down and the hubs translates while I type.

Note: During my internet searching for Revithia recipes, I found a fantastic Greek food blog. I'm now obsessed. Check it out. Mamas Taverna.

So anyways, this recipe failed on a couple of levels. Firstly, the Greek recipe that we translated suggested removing the skins from the chickpeas after soaking them (if you've ever worked with dried chickpeas, or even some canned ones, you will know what I'm talking about). This resulted in me sitting in front of the television for 2 hours, rubbing skins off chickpeas, one by one. (I tried several other more time-effective methods, none of which worked). Upon further internet research, I think this was an unnecessary step. I still can't believe I spent so much time on that...

The second fail was in the seasoning department (and wasn't my fault - thank God, otherwise I'd still be pouting about it - the hubs takes these things much less seriously than I). He had somehow translated the salt and pepper amounts completely wrong, resulting in a soup that tasted like the ocean and burned the back of your throat. Oh, that sad wasted two hours of chickpea hulling! We ended up having to dump the whole thing out. Luckily we still had leftover Fasolakia and ate that instead.

I think we will for sure try this again - next time we won't spend the time taking off the skins (when boiling for the soup, you skim the top, so any errant skins will come out that way), and we will certainly get the seasoning right the second time around.

Recipe here.