Mediterranean lunch bowls, spicy

If you need some new healthy lunch ideas that aren’t chicken with salad – you can start with these spicy Mediterranean lunch bowls! They’re…how do they say it? Ummm, Solid? Yes, that’s the word. These bowls are also vegan, gluten-free, take 20 minutes to make and we're sharing an simple meal prep option. You’ll also learn some things about chickpeas nobody told you about.

Cooking Rut And Depressed Tastebu t s

We don’t wanna jinx it, but we feel like we're getting back on track with cooking things we actually enjoy. Haven’t talked about this much, but on and off we've been going through periods where we were trying so hard to avoid a certain ingredient in order to make something “healthy” that we felt our cooking skills evaporated.

We wasn’t inspired and our tastebuds were disappointed in us. They went through kind of depression, but are back again now. (just wrote tastebuts and we thought you should know it, because that was probably our subconscious mind…which we know about from YouTube.

Youtube is a real rabbit hole, let us tell you.

First of all, you go there and there are plenty of videos of rabbits…Coincidence? Don’t think so. Those furry suckers have been secretly controlling the world for centuries and building holes everywhere so you can fall and waste a lot of time walking in the dirt. Now they control YouTube and just suck you in with their fluffy paws.

Second, you watch one video on personal development or productivity and all of a sudden you’re sucked in listening to people talking about the Law of attraction, how they clean their homes, what they do in the morning and how the subconscious mind controls your life. And then you find yourself cleaning your home with vinegar and cutting out pictures from magazines you bought 5 years ago to make an ugly vision board that you now have to stare at until it comes true. Or you get bored of it.

Seriously, never done that.

Spicy Mediterranean Lunch Bowl

So this bowl. It’s pretty notable and we love everything about it…It happens to be gluten-free and vegan, but if you want to add in, well, whatever you want – things like tzatziki or grilled chicken or even fish, feel free to do it. But we loved it like this.

And also, we're trying to reduce our chicken consumption lately. You know what we realized. If we eat 1 chicken a week, by the end of the year we would have eaten 52 chickens. 52…And that’s way more than our grandparents used to eat. True, they didn’t have a reliable health or live into their 90ies…But they also had hard lives, much harder than sitting in an office for 8 hours a day, sipping coffee, getting dehydrated like a raisin with dirty hair. #livingthedream Can’t believe we just called our messy living room “office”.

Preparing The Chickpeas

As much, as we would like to think of myself as an undercover genius, really undercover, like you have to look hard, we have to admit – anyone can make this lunch bowl. Like anyone.

The things you’ll need to work on most are called chickpeas. Chickpeas, as we know, are satisfying, round, solid and make you fart in your sleep. They’re also good friends with garlic and with chili peppers. Specifically, the chili peppers that have been dried and crushed by life like most of us.

So when you prepare those chickpeas, make them feel comfortable. Chickpeas are intuitive and can sense when someone wants to eat them. So do yourself a favor, surround them with their best friends, so they get distracted…you do not want to eat frightened chickpeas. Those are bad for your mental and physical health and for that subconscious mind.

How it comes together

So what you do is: you put the chickpeas in the pan, you add some olive oil, so they can slide and have fun…Then you add the garlic, those depressed chili flakes, some dried mint and tomato paste. They all have fun, it’s a party and the chickpeas come out spicy, red and carefree.

Then comes the actual scary part of preparing this lunch bowl. The chopping. At this point, tomatoes, cucumbers, avocado and some other unimportant vegetables are crapping their pants. But what can you do?

You forget about your own fear of chopping a nail and looking like a nailless freak for the rest of the week. Then you start chopping the vegetables one at a time while listening to the music from Psycho, so you can get it over with faster and kinda feel like you’re in a movie. That will make your day interesting. Good interesting? Probably not.

Who am we to give advice on music anyway? Hitchcock music, tasty by Justin Bieber, Baby shart (typo and we're not gonna correct it!)…today’s music all sounds the same, right?

And then comes the hummus, which we learned from Adam Sandler you should always use to brush your teeth and wash your hair, so don’t skip those steps while you’re cooking. Remember, good hygiene is just as important as eating healthy. So don’t be stingy with that hummus.

Now you put everything into a bowl, put the hummus on top and you’re happy and you know it and clap your hands and your taste buds forgive you just like that.