Meal prep bowls with chickpeas, vegan

These vegan meal prep bowls with chickpeas and greens are solid if you don’t have any time to cook during the next few days. They make a healthy dinner recipe that is gluten-free, full of flavor, antioxidants, fiber, and essential nutrients.

Don’t know what’s happening with us lately, but we've been crazy about broccoli and spinach. Just slap us and don’t feel guilty about it, we'll accept it.

We don’t even care. 7 years ago, we made fun of our friend for ordering broccoli with blue cheese in a restaurant when we were at a bachelorette party. They ran out of pizza? What’s happening? Today, we're the weird one. Karma.

We're thinking about broccoli and spinach in all their forms – in salads, on pizza, in bowls, everywhere. We're thinking maybe it’s spring…we do need some greens and vitamins to say buh bye winter blues and say hello life, we’re ready for some fun. When we have cravings like this, we're pretty happy about it.

So we were making that spinach and broccoli thing multiple times a day, every single day for a week…One day we just decided to stop wasting time and to actually meal prep it, so we can work and not spend our entire life in the kitchen washing and chopping spinach and broccoli.

That’s right, we decided to swallow our pride and the little bit of throw up that came into our mouth when we started thinking about old food. And we did it. It took us about 16 years to make these chickpea meal prep bowls, but they’re worth it. And so good we actually did eat them the next 2 days for dinner. (huge for us!).

Good Meal Prep Foods?

Here are some good foods for meal prep:

• roasted vegetables
• cooked legumes and grains
• cooked animal protein (if not vegan)
• tofu
• hummus (here’s also a low carb recipe)
• dips with roasted vegetables like this one
• tzatziki (here’s a herby paleo-vegan version that keeps well in the fridge)

Great meal ideas (in our experience) are soups, bowls, curries, muffins, energy bars.

The foods We wouldn’t use for meal prep is fresh fruits and vegetables that spoil fast (for example tomatoes, cucumbers, watermelon, strawberries).

How To Keep Meal Prep Food Fresh?

Now, okay, let’s be honest. We arranged this next “bowl” only for the picture. Then we ate it right away out of that glass container like a hungry animal.

The way we actually kept the rest of the recipe, the way we feel allows us to keep our meals fresh and customizable, is to simply separate the different parts of the bowl in different containers. We used a recycled jar for the hummus, we put the greens and chickpeas in separate glass containers we believe we bought at IKEA hundred years ago. This way we can warm up whatever needs to be warm before we eat and keep the cool stuff cool.

We also washed (but did not chop) some vegetables, so we can always have a fresh salad on the side. Cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, cabbage, herbs, even lettuce – you can pre-wash all that, let it dry (we usually empty the dish rack and let them air dry there) and keep them in the fridge.

We know many people even pre-chop the vegetables, but the reason we don’t do this is that most of the enzymes and the most powerful antioxidants disappear within minutes after you cut a vegetable (or fruit). For example, if we chop up cabbage on Monday, the level of cancer-fighting chemicals it contains drops dramatically.

Now, of course, this happens also with the broccoli and spinach we’ve prepared, but they still do contain essential nutrients and when you eat a fresh salad or drink a smoothie on the same day – you’re doing good. No need to do everything perfectly. But just keep in mind some of the non-essential nutrients (which have extra health benefits) disappear when you let food sit prepared for too long.

How it comes together

You don’t need a lot to make this healthy plant-based bowl, it’s pretty simple.

• You start with a can of chickpeas that you cook with some herbs, spices and olive oil in a pan.
• Take that out, add the spinach, broccoli and some scallions to the pan and cook that for a little bit.
• In the meantime, you’re making the hummus or buying it – whatever you decide.
• We decided to also make this herby & garlicky cream cheese but used sunflower seed butter instead of whole sunflower seeds.
• Oh, and we actually fried one carrot, which was satisfying, but time-consuming, so the option you’ll see in the recipe below is cooking the carrot with the spinach and broccoli.
• Arrange all that in a bowl and enjoy!

We hope you enjoy this tasty chickpea recipe if you do decide to make it!