Jan 5, 2024 4 min read

News media this week is awash in reflections on 2023: the best movies, songs, celebrity mishaps – you know, all the helpful internet clickbait.

We all know it was a pretty nice year for Taylor Swift, and although I’m not necessarily a fan, I think she wears the heck out of a bedazzled bathing suit. But I found my social media posts so irritatingly festooned with photos of Taylor and her football boyfriend that, knowing I’d have to move to a cabin off-grid to escape it, I just leaned into that budding romance and looked up how to pronounce his last name. (It’s got just one syllable.)

When I reflect on things prominent in my past year, I come up with something much less dazzling. I’m talking about the humble chickpea, that beige legume that’s shaped like a little peach and is having a moment.

I always knew them as garbanzo beans, and we only ever crossed paths at salad bars, which offered uncooked ones to toss atop the lettuce. Invariably, they would be marooned in the bowl at the end of the salad, floating in the red juice from the pickled beets. We’d encounter them in hummus, too.

But then I saw a social media video about how to cook chickpeas. In fact there were dozens of videos that amounted to a garbanzo bonanza, the most enticing of which was a video that showed how to turn chickpeas crispy, and I mean so crispy you could hear the crunch when the video chef ate them.

Off to the chickpea checkout line I went with my six cans. As I ran them across the scanner I wondered if a half-dozen was overzealous, but when the tally came to less than six bucks, I let it go.

At home, I drained them, rolled them in a kitchen towel to dry, put them in a skillet with oil and salt and pepper and smoked paprika, and let them get to crisping.

What came next was a stovetop event the video chefs didn’t bother to mention. When heated, a chickpea will explode, and by explode I mean leap out of the pan with the kind of force that usually only happens on a launch pad or during a stupid gender reveal stunt. Those peas have water in them, or maybe gunpowder – I couldn’t tell – but before I could back away four of those suckers rocketed out of the pan, hitting me in the face. I thought about digging out my old fencing helmet to wear the next time.

I put a screen on the pan to control the carnage, and watched as the peas turned a golden brown.

They were nutty and salty, and crispy as can be. I stood at the counter and popped them into my mouth five at a time. When I do that with pretzels, I feel a little guilty, but not with my garbanzos. They are high in protein and fiber and, if I ignore all the oil it took to get them crispy, low in fat.

They are my new favorite snack, and sometimes I put them on salads.

After all these decades of cooking, it has become rare to find something new. What a revelation. And to think the chickpeas were out there in the world all along, minding their own business, ignored by grocery shoppers.

As I ponder the next 12 months, my belly round and full of garbanzos, I wonder what new and strange food will come my way. Yesterday I saw a video about pan-fried steaks made of cauliflower. I shall put on my fencing helmet and give it a try.