Veggie Annie's Skillet: 🍋Take-It-Easy-Lemon-Squeezy🍋 Buffalo Chickpea Taco Bar
Unusually delicious, quick-and-easy meat / vegetarian / vegan recipes for everyone.
Are you the dinner-maker at your house?
Today, maybe you get up from your home desk, having just completed work for the day, and you realize that your crew has to be FINISHED dinner in ONE HOUR in order to get to soccer practice for your kids / your new coding class / an on-line D&D game / your partner’s Zoom call with their therapist.
And nothing is even started.
Maybe you are just plain tired and done today, and you would like to nurture YOURSELF, as well as your beloveds, with a healthy, tasty dinner, having done the minimum amount of work for it. For myself, building in a deliberate pause to eat is priceless for my mental health.
Of course, I’ve certainly had dinners of sliced apples and peanut butter, and I am all for feeding yourself and your people whatever works for you, so do that when you need to! We’ll all be fine! But sometimes YOU want a meal that feels like a pause in your day, instead of a snack on the go. If you can make dinner in a flash, then you can sit and relax for the duration of the meal, and exhale a little.
Check out this first installment of a regular Skillet feature:
🍋Veggie Annie’s Take-It-Easy-Lemon-Squeezy Recipes🍋
Take-It-Easy-Lemon-Squeezy Recipe: Buffalo Chickpea Taco Bar
Makes 4 servings, 3 tacos per serving, using 1/4 cup Buffalo Chickpeas per taco
Takes 15-30 minutes
Vegan
Dairy options
Gluten-free, as long as you use corn tortillas
Nut-free
Doubles easily
Grocery List:
Buffalo Chickpeas
1 stick (8 oz) butter (or coconut oil, to make this vegan)
3/4 cup Frank’s Red Hot Original Cayenne Pepper Sauce (that’s a 12 oz bottle)
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce (or vegan Worcestershire)
(The recipe for Buffalo Sauce on the Frank’s Red Hot website calls for the addition of 1 teaspoon of cayenne powder, but to accommodate more tender palates, I usually leave it out and let folks add extra heat at the table.)
2 15 oz cans chickpeas
Salad
1 chopped salad kit (You could use anything at all - chopped salad kits come in a skillion varieties, including Caesar, Ranch, Green Goddess, assorted fancy Coleslaws, etc. Earthbound Farm is an organic brand.)
Corn and Tomato Salsa
1 1/2 cups frozen corn
1 1/2 cups cherry tomatoes
Splash of bottled lemon juice
Splash of extra-virgin olive oil
1/2-1 teaspoon salt, to your taste
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 teaspoon chili powder (mild or spicy, your choice)
For Serving
1 package of 5-6 inch flour or corn tortillas
Optional:
Sour Cream
Jarred Salsa
Hot Sauces
Bleu Cheese Dressing / Ranch Dressing
Limes
Garlic
Chopped Celery / Celery Sticks
Carrot Sticks
Green Onions
Fresh Herbs
Tiny Paper Cups
Guacamole or plain avocado
This Chickpea Taco Bar produces a pretty damn stellar meal! It takes me 15 minutes for the basic version, with none of the optional parts, from deciding to make it to putting it on the table. For one of my recipe testers it took 10 minutes and another clocked in at 30.
I highly recommend having all the pantry/freezer ingredients on hand - then, the only perishables you’ll need are cherry tomatoes and a salad kit, which can go on the grocery list at the beginning of the week.
It’s also useful (though not necessary!) to have a helper who can pull the cans of chickpeas off the shelf and the hot sauce and butter from the fridge to get you set up, and to potentially stir the salad kit together.
(Note that this Buffalo sauce is basically hot sauce plus butter, and as we are making homemade food, with no emulsifiers or gums, it will separate as it cools a bit, and won’t recombine when reheated. Don’t worry about it - that’s just chemistry for ya.)
Directions
Put butter (1 stick, 8 oz), Frank’s Red Hot (3/4 cup, 12 oz), garlic powder (1 teaspoon) and Worcestershire (1 teaspoon) in a medium saucepan, and turn the heat on to medium-low. While the butter is melting, drain and rinse the chickpeas (4 15 oz cans). Whisk the sauce gently until it’s well-combined, then add the chickpeas, stir well and let it burble gently on the stove for 5 minutes. Stop by to stir it occasionally. Put the lid on. When everything else is done, very gently smush the chickpeas once or twice with the back of a spoon or with a potato masher, leaving the majority whole. If you have extra help / time, you could dice up 2 ribs of celery and scatter that over the chickpeas just before serving.
Get a helper to set out plates, flatware, napkins and water or whatever you drink. Then have that person grab whatever condiments that you like: sour cream, salsa, hot sauces, blue cheese dressing, ranch. If you have extra help / time, you could pour an inch of blue cheese dressing or ranch dressing into a little paper cup for each person, cut some carrot sticks and celery sticks, and stand them up in the cups as a wee side dish.)
Cut open the packages of all the components of the salad kit, put them in a serving bowl (dressing/toppings/add-ins), mix well, stick a serving spoon in, put it on the table.
Put the frozen corn (1 1/2 cups) in the same colander in which you rinsed the chickpeas, and run hot tap water over it for about a minute. Shake the colander to remove the excess water and put the corn in a small serving bowl. Cut the cherry tomatoes (1 1/2 cups) in half and add them to the bowl of corn. Add lemon juice (a splash), olive oil (a splash), salt (1/2 teaspoon), pepper (1/2 teaspoon) and chili powder (1 teaspoon), toss well. Serving spoon, put that on the table. If you have extra help / time, you could add a bit of minced garlic, lime zest, chopped green onions, and / or chopped fresh herbs (cilantro, chives, parsley) to the Salsa.
If you have extra help / time, you could cut some lime wedges, dice an avocado or open some packaged guacamole and put those on the table.
Put the tortillas on a plate and put them on the table.
I’d put the Buffalo Chickpeas in their pan on a hot pad on the table, but you may have a wee bit of energy left to transfer them to a serving bowl! Up to you.
Sit yourself down and have some tacos!
I find it to be a grave temptation to overload a taco. In order to avoid that, you might like to plan on about an eighth of a cup of salad mix down the center of each small tortilla, topped with a quarter cup of Buffalo Chickpeas, topped with several spoonfuls of the Corn and Tomato salsa, then any sour cream, jarred salsa, hot sauce, etc. Top with a squeeze of lime, if you’re using it
.