A Delicious, Colorful, and Nutritious Meal

What's up Steemians!

As I mentioned in my New Year's Resolution post yesterday, this year will be all about optimizing my financial situation as well as my health by cutting out the obsene amount of restaurant food I had been eating over these past few years. I promised to share my journey and the recipes I create along the way with you, and here is the first one of hopefully many delicious and nutritious recipes to come!

I really want to challenge myself to minimize waste by putting together meals with the ingredients I have on hand, and so using the veggies I had left in the fridge and some chickpeas I cooked up yesterday after they had spent months collecting dust in the pantry, I put together this delicious meal. I'm not sure what you could call it, maybe a chickpea stew :) Here are all my ingredients ready to go.

Got some chopped up carrots, onions and peppers, some diced tomatoes, chickpeas, garlic flower, and spices. If you've never had garlic flower I cannot recommend it enough. It's especially delicious when frying up some veggies, by itself or with soy sauce. I used it as a replacement for actual garlic in this recipe as I didn't have garlic on hand. In terms of spices, I used two teaspoons of smoked paprika, two teaspoons of chili powder, one teaspoon of ground cumin, and one teaspoon of garlic powder. I also tossed in a good measure of salt and sugar to round up the taste when it was cooking. Here's what it looked like in the pan.

I didn't take pictures of the interim stages, but the cooking part was pretty simple. Just make sure you cook your veggies and garlic for a few minutes in a bit of oil before throwing everything else in as this really brings out the flavor. Once you have everything in there just let it simmer until everything is cooked well (the carrots took quite a bit of time in my case but if you choose to use different veggies it might not need to simmer much at all).

As I also had about half of a cauliflower left over in the fridge I decided to make curry roasted cauliflower as a side. If you've never made it, or even if you think you don't like cauliflower, you have to try this it will definitely blow your mind! Basically you just break up the cauliflower in small bite-size pieces, toss some olive oil, salt and curry powder on there, and then get your hands dirty by mixing it all together. It should look something like this.

Once it's good to go, throw it in the over at about 400 until it looks nice and golden like the picture below. I didn't time it but I'd say I had it in there for about half an hour, stirring it a couple times to get it to cook evenly. As you can see I also tried quite a few pieces as it was cooking :)

And now, the end result...

Now that's a healthy, delicious meal! Hope you enjoyed this recipe and please let me know below if you have any suggestions that could make it better!

Enjoy today,

William