Smashed Chickpea Salad Sandwiches | Vegan Recipe | Carleigh Bodrug

Plant-based food blogger Carleigh Bodrug—author of the PlantYou cookbook—is best known for her "Scrappy Cooking" series, which focuses on transforming common food scraps into delicious recipes that don't break the bank. For our "Keep or Toss" episode, she shared a super-tasty sandwich AND a way to use a part of the ingredients that you might normally throw away.  

"The key to this amazing chickpea salad is to 'smash' the chickpeas with a potato masher," she says. "I first tested it in a food processor, and the consistency was way too mushy. The masher achieves a texture that is similar to a shredded chicken sandwich, plus it's less cleanup too! It's so delicious—you can serve the smashed chickpeas as a salad on its own, as a wrap, or in a sandwich."   

And don't toss the chickpea water, also called aquafaba, when you drain it! Keep it to use as a vegan egg replacement in mousses, buttercreams, mayo and lots of other recipes, including Carleigh's amazing Vegan Meringue Cookies. They require just four ingredients, taste like any other meringue and save you the waste of throwing out the chickpea water. Win-win-win!