Ground Meat with Chickpeas

How to prepare ground meat with chickpeas

1. Heat the oil in a wide pan. Add the crushed garlic and grated ginger. Sauté briefly until they smell nice, about 1 minute.
2. Add the spices (cumin, coriander, chili and turmeric) and stir quickly until dissolved in the fat.
3. Add the ground meat and press it with a spoon to break it into the smallest pieces possible. Sauté the meat, stirring occasionally until it changes color everywhere. Add salt and grind black pepper during this time. You can let the meat brown a bit if you want. When done, tilt the pan and if there's too much fat you can remove some of it.
4. Add the chickpeas with all the water (or juice from the can), bring to a boil and simmer covered over low heat for 15 minutes. Towards the end, taste for salt.
6. Put the meat with chickpeas on a wide platter. Drizzle yogurt generously. If you have thick yogurt, gradually dilute it with water and add a little salt, just until it flows easily from the spoon. The consistency of drinking yogurt is ideal here.
7. Drizzle mint oil on top (in a mortar crush a few mint leaves or mint and parsley in equal proportions with salt and add oil until it flows easily from the spoon; add a little lemon juice at the end). Instead of mint oil you can use zhoug if you have it prepared.
   If you want, also drizzle some spicy oil (can be store-bought; or easily made: in a small pan put 2 tablespoons of oil in which you dissolve 1/8 teaspoon sweet paprika and 1/4 teaspoon chili flakes; when it starts to sizzle remove from heat).
8. It would go well with a simple salad of tomatoes, cucumbers and red onion, but under current conditions make a salad from whatever greens you have.

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