Delicious Chickpea Salad + Some Rambling

Oh Internet, I cannot remember the last time I went grocery shopping.

Well, okay, I suppose I can. But it was a reaaalllllly long time ago.

My husband I have been busy. Like the kind of busy where you might contemplate trying to fall down a flight of stairs just so you can have an excuse to rest. (Oh crap. I’m going to fall down the stairs now, aren’t I? Well, good thing I never leave the apartment! In your face, FATE!) (Please don’t kill me.)  And we have just been too plain exhausted to think of things like shopping and cooking and so all semblance of normal meals has gone right out the window.

Yesterday? I had a 100-calorie pack of Cheez-Its and a Diet Coke for lunch.

(My husband, however, had a PB&J sandwich that I made him on Monday! And froze! In the freezer! Per Jen’s genius instructions.) (It was a test sandwich. And as the time of this posting, I have not spoken to my husband to get his thoughts on whether the test was successful enough for us to do a full-scale roll out. But I will report back.)

We have been depending on things like Chipotle and take-out sandwiches and microwave meals and frozen pizza and rotisserie chicken for nourishment. Because anything requiring more than opening a microwave, oven, or our mouths requires too much time and effort.

Aside from Failing at Eating Well, I have gotten very behind in anything resembling Normal Sleep. (Stress keeps me from falling and/or staying asleep. Whoo!) So I keep digging myself deeper and deeper into a hole of So Much Work and Not Enough Energy Slash Wakefulness to Do Said Work. Which you really don’t care about, but I am telling you because it has severely limited my blog activity. In the areas of both blog reading and blog writing. And even though you likely did not notice at all, I am SORRY.

If I may try to swing this unwieldy tangent back to the ACTUAL subject of this blog post… Back when we were only on the front edge of busy and we actually had time to shop and also Make Stuff, my husband and I came across an interesting little recipe in Bon Apetit. It was a recipe for Chickpea Salad with several variations. And the recipe was so tiny and unassuming – just a little sidebar in a longer article, not even a sideBAR so much as a sideSQUARE – and it was written in such a breezy, careless, wholly unthreatening manner that I thought “Yes! We could do that!”

It really was quite charming, Internet. It was the recipe equivalent of that friend you have who can throw on an old pair of faded slacks and a wrinkly shirt and, like, a vest or something and look effortlessly and flawlessly stylish and beautiful, but in a way that makes it clear that she didn’t even have to TRY to look stylish and beautiful, that it took really no effort at all (hence the “effortlessly” descriptor, I suppose), but not in a bitchy way – no, more in a collegial “Hey! This is so easy! You could totally look like you stepped off the pages of Abercrombie & Fitch too!” sort of way.

Now, before I get to the recipe I want to warn that it is for a salad, which means it is cold. And I’m telling you this up front because I decide to eat or not eat some things based on their temperature. Usually I would NEVER eat a chickpea that wasn’t hot and also smothered in some sort of cardamom-flavored sauce and accompanied by naan and some fluffy basmati rice. But the charm of the recipe won me over. And I ate the chickpea salad, even though it was cold, and lo! it was delicious.

So delicious that on a recent trip to the grocery store – not to SHOP, because, as I already mentioned, we do not have time for SHOPPING, but to grab some super-quick pre-cooked or super-easy-to-cook food (we have to EAT even if we are busy) – I grabbed some extra lemons so we could make some more. Alas, there was no basil, so we don’t actually have ALL the ingredients. But that’s okay because, even though this salad is easy (effortless!), we still do not have any time to make it.  (Cheez-Its and Diet Coke – that’s all the “cooking” I have in me, Internet.)

You are probably wondering about the ACTUAL recipe, and are feeling, as you read all this irrelevant back story, that I should just get ON with it. So I shall.

Chickpea Salad with Lemon, Parmesan, and Fresh Herbs

(adapted from Bon Apetit)

Ingredients:

1 15-oz can of chickpeas (Bon Apetit would like you to know they are also called garbanzo beans. In case you didn’t know.)

2 Tbsp fresh chopped basil

2 Tbsp chopped fresh Italian parsley (Or not. Parsley will not set foot in our home. NO.)

2 Tbsp fresh lemon juice (From lemons. Even if, as your husband points out, you have a huge Costco-sized bottle of “real lemon” lemon juice in your fridge.)

4 tsp EVOO (Have you ever noticed how Rachael Ray almost always says “Ee vee oh oh” and then specifies “extra virgin olive oil,” just in case you don’t know what EVOO means? Seems to me that doing so kind of negates the usefulness of the acronym, doesn’t it?)

I small garlic clove, pressed

1/4 cup red onion, finely chopped (This is the “adapted” part, as it was not part of the original recipe.)

1/3 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Coarse kosher salt (Or low sodium salt. From a jar.)

(It doesn't look like much, Internet. But do not let my poor salad photography skillz or chickpeas' lack of photogenicity deter you from trying this!)

 

Directions:

1. Open your chickpeas. We used two cans (and then doubled the rest of the ingredients). Pour them into a strainer and rinse them.

2. Combine your chopped basil (and parsley, if you must), fresh lemon juice, EVOO, red onion, and garlic in a medium bowl.

3. Add grated Parmesan cheese.

4. Toss gently to blend.

5. Add salt, to taste.

Do you see how easy that is, Internet? And it was DELICIOUS. I mean, how can you go wrong with garlic and lemon and EVOO and basil and Parmesan? YOU CAN’T. It’s just not possible.

I could totally see myself making this for company, or taking it to a pot luck, or eating it on the porch this summer while sipping a glass of wine.

Here, verbatim from Bon Apetit, are some variations you can try:

“For a spicy version, add some sriracha sauce. Try swapping out the lemon juice for lime juice and use feta cheese instead of Parmesan and mix in some chopped fresh cilantro and chopped red onion or shallot. For a curried chickpea salad, leave out the Parmesan and add curry powder to taste, dried currants, sliced green onions, and shredded carrots.”

Tastes delicious immediately and even better once it’s been sitting in the refrigerator overnight.

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