Savory (and Eternally Cooking) Chickpea Soup

Saturday 10 March
Thought we had chickpeas in our many jars of legumes. Didn't have chickpeas in our many jars of legumes. Barbara went to IGA. They didn't have dried chickpeas. Barbara went to Kroger. They had dried chickpeas. So we cooked chickpeas. Boy did we cook chickpeas. For hours and hours we cooked chickpeas. Still crunchy. Should've just pressure cooked the little bastards, which is what we wound up doing in the end. Don't know if the batch was old or just stubborn. In the end the results were delicious, though.
This is a Spanish soup from Barbara's days excavating there - the dig was in Mallorca, but the soup was modeled after one she had in a cheap restaurant in Barcelona. It made it into the Fear and Loathing Cookbook as "a thick, hearty peasant dish for thick, hearty peasants."
So in a PRESSURE COOKER, sauté
1 chopped onion, 2 minced cloves of garlic, in a little olive oil
Stir in 4-6 TBSP each of the holy duality of coriander and cumin, plus 1 tsp of turmeric, and treat as for an Indian dish: stir-fry the spices until they form a thick, aromatic paste. Then add
1 16-oz (okay, they're now 14.5 oz) can of tomatoes - diced, crushed, what-have-you.
1 lb. of dried chickpeas.
2 smoked Spanish style chorizo sausages, cut into chickpea-size bits.
Add enough water to make a soup.
Then PRESSURE COOK everything for 20 minutes after the top begins to make that hissing, spitting, rattling sound. No, wait, that’s just me.
If you don't have a pressure cooker, keep the soup simmering until the chickpeas are tender, however long that is; it may be hours. It would help if you had pre-soaked them the night before, but that would require forethought - and having chickpeas in one of your many jars of legumes. OR YOU COULD JUST GET THE CANNED KIND AND SAVE YOURSELF THE EFFORT.
Serve with rioja on a soft Spanish night. It really is delicious.

Also spend the quiet of Saturday (well, quiet except for Wagner's Meistersinger on the radio, which isn't really quiet at all) making roasted peppers. Blistered their butts under the grill, then topped with chopped garlic, capers, oregano, pepper, and kosher salt. Though they're really for lunch, they were just too pretty not to include. And they took less time than the chickpeas.