Pea Brains!

We've recently discovered the wonders of Indian grocery stores.  They have fantastic arrays of produce that typical American markets would never think of having.  (I find it helps to shop with access to Wikipedia.)  Among such yummy finds as fresh turmeric, lotus root and curry leaves are ... PEA BRAINS!!!!

These are actually fresh chick peas (green chana) which grow in individual fuzzy pods:

They taste really good right from the pod, a little bit like a fresh sweet pea, but we decided to follow the recommendation of the people in the grocery store and to: Fry them in oil with turmeric and chili.  (This, by the way, was how they recommended cooking a lot of the mysterious veggies we picked up).

It's was a lot of work to shuck the things:

But made for a very satisfying pile of pea brains (BRAINS!):

We found that the frying method tended to dry them out a bit, so we needed to add some water and let them simmer for a short while.  And we ate the pea brains (BRAINS!!!) on non-authentic pasta -- delicious!