How To Make Mediterranean Chickpea Salad

To start you’ll need 30 ounces of canned chickpeas, which are also known as garbanzo beans. These are generally sold in 15 ounce cans, so you’ll need 2 cans. Then give them a quick rinse, then we’ll pour these all into a large mixing bowl. Then it’s time to cut up all of our vegetables. 

You’ll need either 1 English cucumber, which it has a thinner skin, or 2 regular cucumbers. If you’re using regular, I recommend you peel them a little bit, and by a little bit, I mean peel it so that there’s those little stripes that you often see on sliced cucumbers.

To dice a cucumber you’ll want to start by slicing it in half lengthwise, flip each half over, and slice them in half lengthwise again. Then you should be able to chop them into little bite-sized pieces. Then we’ll add these in with our chickpeas. 

Then we need to halve some cherry or grape tomatoes, you can cut them in half lengthwise or down the middle, and if they’re large you may want to quarter them. What you really want is just to make sure that everything is bite sized.

Of course we’ll add these into our mixing bowl as well.

Then we’ll go ahead and dice up a bell pepper, I’m using green, but really you could use any color for this.

With the bell pepper I like to do a little smaller than bite sized though, just so you get that little bit of crunch spread throughout the salad.

It is fun to use like a yellow or an orange bell pepper just for the mix up of color in the salad. 

Now red onions are best for serving raw in a salad, and you can either slice these very thinly or dice them up, whichever you prefer. You want to use 1 small red onion or half of a larger one. Next up are our fresh herbs. 

Today I’m using a combination of fresh mint and fresh basil, but feel free to play around with things, and you can always substitute in fresh parsley. I’m gonna mince up the mint first, and you want leaves only for this, so pull out any stems, and just mince it up.

You’ll need 2 tablespoons total. I just love the fresh, cool flavors that the fresh mint brings. With the basil, same thing. It’s leaves only, and you’ll need about 2 tablespoons total. You just want to give that a fine mince. Basil and mint go really well together.

We’re also going to add in 1/2 cup of sliced kalamata olives, and 1/2 cup of crumbled feta. That’s it for our salad ingredients. Now we can move on to the dressing. While you still have your cutting board and knife out, slice a lemon in half cuz you’re gonna need some freshly squeezed lemon juice. 

Give mine a squeeze here, you need about 2 tablespoons total, and depending on the juiciness of your lemon and its size, it’ll probably be about 1 small one or maybe 1/2 of a large one.

We’ll go ahead and pour that lemon juice into a little mixing bowl where we’re going to make the rest of our dressing. Next add in 1-2 tablespoons of honey, and if you microwave it for about 10 seconds first it mixes in a lot easier. 

You’ll also need 3 tablespoons of good quality extra virgin olive oil, about 2 tablespoons of white wine vinegar, or you can use red, then last you’ll add in 1/4 teaspoon of salt and 1/4 teaspoon of black pepper, and whisk this together. 

You can always add more salt and pepper to taste. Just remember you already have some salty items in the salad with the feta and the olives, so what you’ll want to do is make the dressing as is, and then add more salt and pepper to taste.

All that’s left to do is drizzle this over the salad and toss this altogether. Course you can just serve this up in the mixing bowl, but I’m gonna transfer mine to a nice, pretty bowl for serving.

This will stay good in the fridge for several days, so it’s great to make a big batch of this at the start of the week and enjoy it for meals the rest of the week.