Rainbow Chickpea Salad

This is a beautiful salad, tasty and filling too. In fact, you can eat this salad with a piece of some bread and it will be a complete meal. I saw a wonderful chickpea salad recipe one afternoon on a Rachel Ray "30 Minutes Meal" episode. I realized that I had most of the ingredients and could make it with a few substitutions. So, I tried it the very same day and I must say I absolutely loved it. This recipe can be tailored to your tastes by swapping the ingredients with other vegetables and beans. Once you try this salad, you will want to experiment with other bean salads too. It is so colorful that I thought the "rainbow" adjetive might suit it. It is pleasing to the eyes and the taste buds. And since it's so colorful, it maybe an easy way to get your kids to eat their vegetables and proteins.

Ingredients
2 cups chickpeas/garbanzo beans/kabuli chana (cooked - see tips for directions)
1 cup red onion diced into small pieces
1 cup bell peppers (red, yellow and orange), diced into small pieces
2 stalks of celery, chopped
1 clove garlic, crushed into a paste
2 tbps red wine vinegar (you can use any kind you have on hand)
1 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
salt to taste
pepper to taste

Method
Whisk together the vinegar, oil and some salt and pepper. Mix together all the diced vegetables and the chickpeas. Pour over the vinegar-oil dressing and toss the ingredients together, so that the vegetables and beans get well coated with the dressing. Adjust salt and pepper to taste.

This makes a great mid afternoon snack as well.   

 
Tips
If you have pre-cooked canned garbanzo beans, rinse them our and use that. However, if you are starting off with dry beans, then soak them overnight. Next morning, you will see that they will swell up and become rehydrated, so that you can easily eat it. Then, either boil it in water for about 20-30 minutes till they are cooked through and softened or pressure cook them. Don't overcook them. They should not be so soft that they become mushy. They should still be firm.
As I have said in previous posts, the pressure cooker is a wonderful device. It reduces the cooking time to the fraction of the original cooking times and as you cook the ingredients for a shorter time, you retain more nutrition.