Ridiculously Healthy Chickpea Salad

As much as we’d love to keep filling in our Fry Me a River section with new recipes, sometimes we do feel the need to go through a bit of a healthy phase, which lead us to this super healthy chickpea salad. It’s all for the bigger picture: the sooner we do this, the quickest we can go back to frying chicken wings.

I’m not gonna lie, my favourite way of eating chickpeas is and it will always be in a hummus form. Nevertheless, this easy healthy salad came in as a very close second. It’s fresh, easy, crunchy and very flavourful. It might come as a surprise that it takes only 5 minutes to make while still ticking all the boxes.

If you need a bunch of plus sides or reasons why you should make it (as if you’d need them), this recipe is:

• Healthy
• Rich in protein
• Quick
• Easy
• Vegan
• Dairy free (duh)
• Gluten free
• Summer-friendly (especially if you don’t live in the UK, where summer might mean 17°C/62°F)

Healthy Chickpea Summer Salad

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Prep Time 10 minutes mins

Course Main Course, Side Dish

Cuisine Mediterranean

Ingredients

  

• 2 cans chickpeas
• 1 carrot
• 1 red/orange bellpepper
• 10/15 whole almonds
• 15 gr parsley
• 15 gr coriander
• 1 tsp rose harissa (or normal harissa)
• 1/2 tsp ground ginger
• 1/4 tsp cumin
• 1/2 lemon (juice)
• 1/2 lime (juice)
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• pinch of salt

Instructions

 

• Drain the chickpeas and wash them thoroughly. Transfer to a big bowl.
• Grate the carrot and add to the bowl.
• Chop the bell pepper and add to the bowl.
• Add the almonds to the bowl. Or crush them a bit if you want to have the illusion of actually cooking something.
• Wash, dry and chop both parsley and cilantro. Add to the bowl.
• Add the groung ginger and the cumin. Add the harissa. Add the olive oil. Mix all together and add salt to taste.
• That's literally it.

Keyword Easy and quick recipe ideas, Summer Recipes

Healthy thoughts on chickpeas (and story time)

I remember when I was a sweet young lady and I could eat bread, pasta, and fries all day every day while sipping a pint of beer at my job at the pub with no repercussions. If you’re like Jake, you might think that Italians have a different metabolism, one more prone to accept processed carbs. As much as I wish that was true, growing up taught me that the sad truth is very different.

Back then, this guy was working with me at the pub. He was a very vocal vegan, and my brightest memory of him is seeing him eating chickpeas every single time we had a shift together. In my 22-year-old head, while I was crunching on my toasted prosciutto ciabatta (that I, too, used to have pretty much every day) I couldn’t help but wonder: how? How do you not get tired of chickpeas?

But then I got past the golden 25, realised that my carbs intake was not going hand in hand with my no-longer-22-years-old metabolism, and had to find ways to fill myself up without slicing a homemade loaf for the third time. Unfortunately.

The bright side is that now when we go grocery shopping, we buy 6 to 8 cans of chickpeas knowing that we’re gonna use the hell out of them. I’m actually already planning a whole post dedicated to chickpeas recipes only.

I finally see now why everyone would eat them so frequently: they allow us to reduce our meat intake, which is one of my objectives on Ecologi (where I have my own forest of 124 trees and counting that you should definitely check out); they’re full of proteins; they’re so filling and make us (especially me) crave carbs less; they don’t make us feel sleepy afterwards. It’s a win-win-win-win. Basically, I discovered I like healthy food and now I’m raving about a few years too late.

Thoughts on Spices

There’s no secret in cooking, if not for one: spices. I’m not sure how I spent so many years of my life literally just using a bit of rosemary here, a bit of oregano there, a bit of basil on my pizza and that’s it.

I couldn’t be more wrong. Spices are everything. All of our dishes would be absolutely nothing without them. And some of them have such amazing health benefits, such as ginger and turmeric. This healthy chickpea salad too would be nothing without the spices we used: the ginger gives it a pungent kick, while the cumin gives it a slight curry flavour.

But I do understand how it might feel scary to experiment with spices you’re not familiar with. I totally get that, because that’s exactly why I was not experimenting with mine. You can do some studies on your own (Kitchn provided an excellent comprehensive list of spices that can start give you a vague idea) but then again, you just have to try and become more confident with them.

After many, many attempts I now literally just throw a bunch of spices together, and fingers crossed it’s gonna work out. And the thing is, it usually does. So if you don’t want to experiment, it’s fine: we’re gonna do the dirty work for you. And write down as we go: multiple times was precisely experimenting just to forget how much did I put in.