I wanted an inexpensive meal without having to clean a lot of pots.

Curries are good to fit that description because they cook up quickly in a single pot and the ingredients list is generally cheap once you have the necessary spices.

Ordinarily I keep a well stocked spice rack. But I found myself entirely out of cumin, one of the critical spices in building a full flavored curry. But since I was hungry and not terribly interested in venturing out to find the missing spice, I went ahead and cooked up the curry — a base of garlic and onion followed by canned chickpeas — sans cumin. Near the end I tossed in some tomatoes.

The result was a fragrant, hearty meal for about two dollars a serving. While I might have noticed the missing cumin, you wouldn’t know it from looking at the photos. And in the end, that’s all that really matters, right?