Moroccan Carrot Chickpea Stew

This simple, pantry led Moroccan carrot stew, with only five ingredients plus spices. Just onion, carrots, canned tomatoes, garlic, and chickpeas. Really easy and delicious, it’s a perfect weeknight option.

This recipe was originally shared as part of a 12 days of Christmas series in 2014. It has been updated with new photos and tweaks to the recipe in February 2019. 

Missed previous posts in this series? Here are days one, two, three, four, and five.

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think of a good main dish recipe for this series. I had originally thought to make bean and lentil balls with cranberry sauce, but then saw this recipe from Oh She Glows, which was very similar to what I had been planning.

Last week, when I had next to nothing in the house, I made this easy carrot chickpea stew with some bottom of the bin vegetables. Graham said it was the best I’ve ever made. Moroccan food can be festive too, right?

This healthy vegan Moroccan carrot stew only needs five main ingredients. Seriously. There are more spices than veggies. Carrots make up the bulk of it, but you can substitute whatever you have on hand, especially if it’s a root vegetable. Sweet potato (as in this Moroccan sweet potato stew), pumpkin, even regular potatoes are good.

It’s a great recipe to clean out your cupboards or if you feel like you don’t have anything in the house. These are pantry basics for me – carrots, onions, garlic, come kind of legume, and canned tomatoes. Toppings are optional; a handful of greens, a few seeds, and some dried fruit are nice additions, but not needed.

Because there are so few ingredients, you really need to use the best you can get your hands on. Good quality tomatoes are particularly important. I used some that I canned in the summer, but a good option would be something like Eden Organics. It makes a huge difference.

I measured out all the spices because the taste can change drastically with little differences in spice, but you can change them to suit your tastes. Don’t balk at the high amount of cinnamon, it blends in and balances things out. A squeeze of lemon can be added at the end of the cooking time if your tomatoes are quite sweet, but taste for that, because some can be very acidic.

Oh man, on that note, I noticed today that all my apple preserves from the summer went bad. Dozens of jars of applesauce and apple butter went mouldy inside. They were still sealed, but no longer safe. Apparently it was because I used windfall apples and they need significantly more acid.

I needed to add a lot more lemon juice. It was such a disappointment, though, to open a jar and see mould. So much food, time, and work is going to be thrown out. I’ve been canning for years and never had problems before, but using different ingredients resulted in a lot of waste. If nothing else, this was a good lesson. Do your research before canning!

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