Roasted Chickpea Salad Bowl

This Friday (May 27, 2016) is the day I have been looking forward to for twelve years, and I'm definitely in denial.

It's the day I graduate from high school amid my friends and family and set off towards the real world, in the form moving across the country for college.

Last night, a long-time friend and I went to a vegetarian/vegan cafe for dinner and talked about the important things: food, life, YouTube, and college. We were talking about how people's backgrounds could or could not define them.

It's so strange to look at the life I've lived so far and say, this is all background.

Someday I'll have a real job or a real mission and I will think about how my first 18 years set the way for that. The life I've been living isn't the story, it's the context. It's strange to thing about, but super exciting. I have the rare opportunity to have a new start once I get to college in the fall, and I could not be more excited.

I guess I'm expected to be reflective and nostalgic as high school comes to an end and I say adios to my teachers and classmates. So that was my attempt at being reflective. I hope it went alright.

To all the other graduates reading this, huge congrats and happiness going forward. Let's go do stuff that will make our backgrounds proud.

Now that I've been super gushy and maybe made you all sad, let's switch gears and talk about something that matters to more people than just me: food.

I'm a huge fan of roasted chickpeas, which you can tell my the presence of now two recipes for them on my site. They're crispy and chewy, spicy or not, and really easy and cheap to make. Adding the salad ingredients was just a lovely bonus, making the chickpeas part of a more complex and wholesome meal. But you still get to eat a whole serving of chickpeas, and that's really what we're about.

Roasted Chickpea Salad Bowl
(makes 1 bowl)

FOR THE ROASTED CHICKPEAS
Ingredients:

• 1 can of chickpeas/garbanzo beans
  
• 1 tablespoon of olive oil
  
• 1/4 teaspoon each of your favorite spices (I used garam masala, cumin, cayenne, and paprika.)

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 400˚F.
   
2. In a bowl, combine all the ingredients and stir until the chickpeas are well coated with oil. Remove any of the soft, clear bean shells you see from the bowl.
   
3. Spread out the chickpeas evenly on a piece of parchment paper on a baking sheet. Bake for 30 minutes, or until the beans are dark brown and totally crispy on the outside.

FOR THE SALAD BOWL
Ingredients:

• a handful of fresh spinach leaves
  
• 1/2 of a bell pepper, cut into strips
  
• 8 cherry tomatoes, cut into halves
  
• 1 batch of roasted chickpeas (above)
  
• drizzled olive oil to taste
  
• drizzled vinegar to taste

Directions:

1. Fill the bottom of a bowl with the spinach, and top it with the pepper, tomatoes, roasted chickpeas, olive oil, and vinegar. Enjoy!

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