Chickpeas are the new meat in our household. Seriously, my cooking has been transformed utterly since I acquired Madhur Jaffrey's Easy Vegetarian Curry and Meera Sodha's Indian Cooking. Easy, simple, all the work of chopping, grating etc. is done before the cooking so you don't get stressed by having to do two things at once, and the same ingredients crop up over and over again. Of course if you're an actual Indian serving 7 different recipes at a time, the no-stress thing doesn't apply, but I only ever make one dish. And now that Hussein has shown me how to make rice Afghan-style, I don't even need a rice cooker (which is lucky, because ours finally broke after over 20 years of service).