February 1st: Baked Goat Cheese and Apple Salad, Crunchy Roasted Chickpeas

Vegetarian main: from February 2011's Chatelaine: Baked Goat Cheese and Apple Salad. This was good, but not quite as good as I had been expecting. I love goat cheese, and coating it in almonds then baking it was genius; I'll definitely do that part again. The rest of the salad was just good, not great. Be gone, ye.

Rather than using a can of chickpeas, I used dried, soaked for a day then boiled for an hour and refrigerated until tonight. I've decided dried is definitely the way to go with beans; it takes a bit more foresight, but so much cheaper and really not at all hard. I made one modification to the recipe; instead of using the cooked chickpeas as they were, I baked them as per Cooking With My Kid's Crunchy Roasted Chickpeas. I thought the crunchy texture might be a welcome contrast to the salad. As it turns out, I preferred the squishy variety, though both were okay.

Olivia and I seem to have experienced taste bud conversion. We both enjoyed the chickpeas immensely tonight. I've never liked them before, and as I was telling Olivia, when I tried feeding them to her when she was a baby, she spit them out. She thought that was pretty funny, and gamely ate them up as I told her this story. Greg, however, has taste buds stuck in the past; he's still not into them. We'll work on that.

Even if she didn't eat chickpeas, she was a good eater.

Okay, confession: I LOVE junk food. Chocolate, cookies, cake, ice cream, candy, popcorn and especially, more than anything else, chips. I am always looking for a replacement snack for chips, something salty and crunchy, that goes well with a glass of lemon and Perrier. I have yet to find something that satisfies the craving. However, these crunchy chickpeas were pretty good. If nothing else, as I sit here typing away on the laptop, eating them, they are way, WAY more filling than chips, so even if I wanted to, I couldn't eat anything else right now. Final note: I prefer the way they taste after 20 minutes in the oven, rather than the full 40 recommended in the recipe.