Recipe: Chickpea Salad Sandwiches

This is another one of those "so simple it's hardly a recipe" kinds of recipes, but it's also yummy!

My kids have never been much for sandwiches, in fact, for years, I rarely even had bread in the house, BUT now that we have music lessons that finish up right at (or past, if you ask my kids) lunchtime, packing lunches once a week is a part of our routine, and since we then eat those lunches as we're driving, they need to be low mess lunches (when we pack lunches to take to museums or the park or something, I'll often pack pasta salad or something similar), which tends to mean . . . sandwiches.

The kids do like egg salad, and will eat peanut butter and jelly (fruit juice sweetened jam), or peanut butter and (raw) honey, if I'm REALLY low on ingredients and time. And once in awhile, when I can get the Tofurkey vegetarian lunch "meat" on sale, we'll have lettuce, tomato, cheese and lunch meat sandwiches, but that all still gets old after awhile, so I've been on the lookout for healthy, inexpensive, vegetarian sandwich options.

A few months ago we went to a friend's house for a playdate, and she had, along with egg salad, "chickpea salad" sandwiches for lunch. The girls LOVED them (and so did I), she told me she just made it like egg salad only with chickpeas. I did a few searches online for something similar but everything I came up with either was more complicated than  I wanted to mess with, or had stuff I didn't want to use in it, so in the end, I made up my own recipe, based off of MY egg salad recipe. I LOVE this because it's quick (I tend to forget until the morning of lessons that I'm going to need to make sandwiches, at which point getting eggs cooked, peeled, COOLED, and made into salad to put in sandwiches can be a challenge), and uses ingredients I generally have on hand (and everything is pantry ingredients until it's open, so it's easy to make SURE I stay well stocked).

Ingredients:
1 can chickpeas, drained
mayonnaise
celery salt
dill pickles, chopped fine (or I suppose you can buy dill relish, but it usually has ingredients I don't like. I buy dill pickles w/o added coloring, and don't have to worry about what my kids are eating when they inhale an entire jar in one sitting)
any other seasonings that sound good to you

I found that a potato masher works best to smash up the chickpeas w/o turning them into hummus. Once the chickpeas are mashed stir in mayonnaise, chopped pickles, and seasonings, to taste.

That's all there is to it. Super easy, and all 3 of my kids LOVE it!

I'm linking up to Try a New Recipe Tuesday.