Winter and soups go hand in hand and among them chickpea soup is my favourite of all the soups that we make with legumes in Greece.
So a simple bowl of this soup accompanied by a bit of home made bread and a nice chunk of Feta cheese and i am in heaven... Am salivating just by writing this sentence. 

Maybe the memory of a pot of chickpeas simmering away over my head when i was a kid and i was sleeping in the kitchen just behind the stove is what makes it all tick. But why i have this only with the chickpeas and not with beans or lentil? who knows.. 
I cannot answer that. I thought that maybe there is a particular scent that chickpeas have but i was not able to find anything about the aromatic compounds of chickpeas. 

So i remember my mom buying legumes in bulk from the specialty shop close to the house, she would soak them in water for a few hours, use a bit of baking soda to make them even softer and run an empty glass bottle of water over them to break up the skin of the chickpeas and then continue with the cooking. A labour of love and maybe that was the special thing that make them taste so much better and me not being to reproduce this wonderful taste ever again. 

On the other hand i was always buy the legumes from the super market, maybe because i always used to buy the chickpeas without the skin, who knows.. 

Until one day i made it. But i used the best ones i could find. I have talked to you in the past about the wonderful people of Dikotylon here and here that produce their beans and other legumes on the plateau of Feneos which used to be the bed of a dried up lake.. I love their products and feel safe that what ever i buy from them is safe, tasty and fresh. 

Because the freshness of legumes is of upmost importance since the older they are the more time it takes them to boil. And it is the main reason why some times you boil and boil and boil some beans and nothing happens.
So, let's take a look at how i prepared my chickpea soup yesterday...