Tomato, basil and chickpea salad – vegan and gluten-free, healthy

Need a fast and fresh healthy salad recipe? Try this simple tomato, basil and chickpea salad for lunch or share at your dinner table. It’s ready in about 10 minutes and all you need to do is some chopping and working a can of chickpeas.

Healthy Tomato, Basil Chickpea Salad

We’re looking at this gorgeous tomato and chickpea salad and we’re all thinking the same. What’s that carrot doing in there?

Well our sister made this light, refreshing and satisfying salad for lunch last week and may we say: it was notable. Solid on its own for lunch, also as a side and you can have it for dinner as well. It’s vegan, gluten-free and loaded with antioxidants.

As with most recipes at Gaical you can make this salad in almost no time. We know we all don’t like to cook for hours when we’re hungry and busy. This is just another way to use our all-time favorite combination of chickpeas, basil and tomatoes. Add some sesame seeds and lots of onions and you’ll be happy for the rest of the week.

Unusual Ingredients

Let’s get back to the carrot story. We had a whole bag of carrots and we needed to use them asap or let them die moldy in a few days. And thus one of them was chopped brutally and made it into the salad. There – mystery of the carrot solved. If you don’t like the carrot in the salad – just leave it out.

But be warned that carrots besides being good for your eyes and making your vision clear also whiten your teeth when you chew them. And as if that wasn’t enough – because they contain lots of beta-carotene they give your skin a nice orange glow (you’d need to you eat a ton of them to develop a completely safe condition called carotenemia for that). Isn’t that the dream of the whole Jersey Shore cast?

The only other unusual ingredient beside that carrot are the nigella seeds. They make everything so pretty. And they taste awesome, although we needed some time to get used to them. It’s like with cilantro – at first, we didn’t like it, but once we started eating it more regularly, we're mesmerized by its smell and want to put it in everything we make.

In the past the only time we had nigella seeds was on flatbread. Warm satisfying flatbread. Mmmm. Stop it. We had no idea what those tiny black things were. We thought it was dirt or just burnt sesame seeds that tasted weird. Turns out they’re nigella seeds aka black cumin. We did not like cumin as well.

People change, we're telling you.

And just like cumin nigella seeds do have some extra health benefits. A lot of them. We think it can even compete with our friend garlic in that. Nigella is considered to be anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, antioxidant, protect against cancer and heart disease…but it’s not a health food competition.

If you’re interested in anti-inflammatory foods that will make you feel great and look beautiful, we've written a post about 5 other awesome anti-inflammatory foods that you can check out here.

Let’s take a look at the health and beauty benefits of this lovely salad.

Health and Beauty Benefits

As you can imagine this salad is not just great for your taste buds, it’s also healthy because it’s bursting with carotenoids (thank you red pepper, tomatoes, and carrot!), vitamin C (all veggies), E (sesame oil, sesame seeds), detoxifying phytochemicals from onions, and thanks to sesame seeds – lots of calcium.

We need all these are nutrients during summer, because they protect us from the free radicals caused by higher sun exposure.

If we don’t stop them, those free radicals can do with us whatever they want (<- said in a paranoid way). These free radicals cause wrinkles & skin cancer, make us age with the speed of light and cause various health issues (to say the least) like cancer and cardiovascular diseases.

So by incorporating more salads like this one and more fruits and vegetables in general into our diets, we can delay aging and prevent disease.

Ok, now that you’re done and motivated to eat tomatoes, let’s make the recipe!