I’ve been spending $7 at least once a week for Tom Colicchio’s chickpea sandwich at ‘wichcraft. I’ve already waxed poetic about my love for the sandwich, and as my dad helpfully pointed out, this is not a sustainable addiction, at least for a soon-to-be-unemployed intern.
Since I can’t buy one every day, I decided to try to make one of my own. Of course I’ve been thinking about it for weeks, but I finally bit the bullet this afternoon. Sadly, Smitten Kitchen beat me to the recipe, though as it turns out, my chickpea salad is pretty different from both hers and Tom’s (we’re on a first-name basis). Part of the reason is that I didn’t want to buy parsley or roasted red peppers, and part of the reason is that as I tasted while making (which I’m very prone to do), I realized that I didn’t really miss the olive oil or the salt.
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I chose not to add olive oil because I thought it tasted really good without it. Your call on that.
It would be great on toasted pieces of baguette or in a sandwich or on crackers or on pita chips or on flatbread or straight out of the bowl with the fork you used to mash. I’ll let you guess which route I went …
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup marinated olives
- 1 15-ounce can chickpeas
- 1/4 medium red onion
- juice of one lemon
Instructions
- Chop the olives. Both the Smitten Kitchen recipe and Tom use black olives, but I’m an equal opportunity eater when it comes to olives, so I went with a mix of spicy marinated ones. The marinade adds a lot of flavor to the salad, so I recommend it. I also used a lot more than either recipe called for, so my final product was almost half chickpea, half olive. But I really like olives.
- Drain and rinse the chickpeas. Then chop the onion as finely as you can (in my case, not so fine).
- Add the lemon juice. You can add the zest too, if desired.
- Toss in a medium-large bowl. Add salt and pepper (I went with just pepper — the extra olives added plenty of salt). Then use the back of a fork or a potato smasher to mash away. You could probably get good results with a food processor as well, but who wants to clean one of those?
Smashed Chickpea and Olive Salad
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen and Tom Colicchio
you realize you this is ghugni with olives right? that sounds delish actually.
Gughni is more tomato-ey and spicy duh.
I’ve actually got a recipe for something similar to gughni that I want to try soon though. Maybe then you’ll come visit me.