Shop That: Lemony Chickpea Stew

Gear and ingredients you need for this recipe, with links to Carla's picks

Ever watch one of Carla’s videos or read her recipes and wonder, where’d she get that?? What’s she using right there?? Which one is the good one? That’s why Shop That exists.

Today’s post goes with the recipe for Lemony Chickpea Stew.

Lemony Chickpea Stew is super pantry-friendly, and there aren’t a ton of specialty ingredients required, but a couple of key items will help ensure a spoon is in your mouth at the 30-minute mark.

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Sourcing Spices

Carla uses coriander seeds ($11 per 30-g tin), dried dill ($8.99 per 3-oz bag), and dried mint ($7.99 per 3-oz bag) as her stew aromatics — which complement the fresh celery. Big love, as always, to SOS Chefs, Burlap and Barrel and Kalustyan’s, which provide the bulk of Carla’s specialty spices. The coriander seeds used in this particular video are from Diaspora Co—now offered in larger tin packages.

Lemon Tools

The star of the show here is, of course, the humble lemon. All of the lemon. We have zest, we have juice, we have wedges, we’ve got verified layers of lemon.) Carla loves this OXO Good Grips Prep Y-Peeler—the blade is super sharp and makes shaving the very top layer of peel pretty effortless. Once a wooden reamer devotée, the Chef’n Juicer finally converted Carla.

Mortar and Pestle

Breaking the spices into smaller pieces before adding them to the stew not only amps up their flavor (more surface area), also makes the texture more palatable (biting into a whole coriander seed can be a lot). Carla uses a Mason and Cash mortar that she bought eight thousand years ago at Zabar’s. It’s been loved— a giant piece of it even broke off and was kindly glued back in place by none other than Brad Leone one day in the test kitchen. The exact same style/size is annoyingly hard to find, but this porcelain mortar & pestle from March is similar, as is Williams Sonoma’s ceramic offering.

Best Blenders

Vitamix is the queen of all blenders and the 5200 Model that Carla gifted herself on her 39th birthday will whip up a perfect green sauce for this recipe, and then continue to serve you well for decades. If a countertop blender isn’t in the cards, the hand blenders from Breville ($129.95) and Braun ($79.95) work well and come with their own chopping bowls.

Heavy Lidded Pot

A wide, shallow, slope-sided, substantial, lidded skillet can be hard to find, but you will never regret the purchase. When not simmering things or using it to build a pasta sauce, it can morph into a regular heavy skillet, or use it as a roasting pan for a whole chicken or a tray of veggies. Carla’s using the 3 1/2-quart braiser from Le Creuset in Chambray. Le C just released Peche, the color of the season, and (at writing), there’s free shipping being offered online.