Hello! I’m skipping “What I Ate Wednesday” again, mostly because I did not snap photos of my eats yesterday (#foodbloggerfail), but also because I want to share this recipe, and I’m not sure I’d get it up this week if I didn’t do it today.

I made this veggie-heavy salad over the weekend for a get-together to celebrate the visit of a colleague from our department who moved last year, but was in town for the weekend. Whenever there’s a gathering in which the hostess requests that guests bring a dish to share, I almost always bring a dessert. Why? Because I love dessert and I get sad if there is only non-vegan dessert that I cannot eat (although, truth be told, I will occasionally eat those anyway–almost always with regret! eep!). But as you know, I’m trying to cut down on even alternative-sweetener goodies, and I’m at a place that I am more disappointed if there isn’t a healthy vegan non-dessert option at a gathering (especially if the gathering food is all I’m having for dinner, as it was on Sunday). SO, long story short, I decided to bring a healthy salad to share.

I guess you could call this a sort of “kitchen sink” salad—you know, those recipes where you use “everything but the kitchen sink.” I never loved that name (doesn’t it make you think of eating soapy dish water?), but I really did use nearly every vegetable in our refrigerator. We had carrots, beets, radishes, cucs, and broccolini, all that needed to be used ASAP.

I have a love/hate relationship with vegetable chopping, but I decided to bring some of my yoga-patience to this endeavor. I treated the chopping as a zen practice, and ended up doing a sort of julienne/dicing combo to make perfectly bite-size veggies pieces.

I then made the dressing with five simple ingredients:

Olive oil, lemon juice, brown mustard, brown rice syrup, and salt&pepper to taste.

The last step was simply to add a can of rinsed and drained chickpeas. Put the veggies and chickpeas in a bowl, stir in the dressing and mix it all together for a crunchy, delicious, nutritious veggie salad.

Rainbow Chickpea Salad

Loosely adapted from Clean Food

2-3 carrots, chopped

1/4 small cucumber, chopped

1-2 c broccolini (leaves&stems, too!), chopped

1 c beets, chopped

4 small radishes, chopped

1 can chickpeas, rinsed and drained

cilantro for garnish

Dressing:

1 T brown rice syrup

1 T olive oil

1 t brown mustard

1/2 lemon (juice)

s&p, to taste

A rainbow salad of nutrition. Nay! Dare I say a double-rainbow of nutrition?

I’m submitting this recipe to Healthy Vegan Friday and Wellness Weekend!