Toasted Chickpeas with Cinnamon & Sugar

When I cut gluten, wheat, bread and all of that from my diet and started doing 4 Hour Body, the one thing I missed was being able to have toast with cinnamon & sugar on it. It was one of my “comfort foods” when I had heartburn, See it here at lizzardo.com, to expand your knowledge about this. which is ironic now that I know that wheat was a big source of my heartburn. No wonder it didn’t work, but it definitely tasted good to me at the time!

One day I saw a recipe online somewhere that eventually inspired me to ask Mike if cinnamon & sugar on toasted chickpeas would work because it was one of the few cravings I was still dealing with – turns out it is delicious! Because I like savory mixed in with my sweet, we also add salt on them.

Depending on who you talk to, chickpeas (garbanzo beans) are not Paleo-friendly. Since I eat them rarely and they do not upset my stomach, I have kept them in my diet. They are 4 Hour Body friendly.

Posts on this blog are normally cooked by Mike and photographed by me, but Mike was out of town for work recently, leaving me to fend for myself. I hate to cook normally and will do almost everything to avoid it, but the light was perfect one afternoon so I whipped these up just so I could photograph them!

Cooking with Mike has obviously rubbed off on me; before I prepped the garbanzo beans for cooking, I pulled everything out that I would need for making them.

Rinse your garbanzo beans well, and allow them to drain while you start to melt the butter.

I discovered while melting my butter that there is one down side to me being both the cook & the photographer. I stopped paying attention to my butter, and took it from melted to a little bit browned. Oops! It didn’t hurt anything though. I like to think it added to the flavor!

I have made this in the past with olive oil instead of butter, and I prefer the flavor of butter more. I discovered that it splatters less, and with the chickpeas well drained they did not try to pop themselves out of the pan on me.

I let the chickpeas cook until they reached the golden brown that I was looking for – not too burnt, but nice and crisp. Most of the butter was gone from the pan by the time I reached that point.

I then placed the chickpeas in a bowl, and tossed them with cinnamon, sugar & salt to taste. I prefer to do this in a bowl and off of the heat so that the sugar does not burn in the pan in to little clumps of charred caramel. I made that mistake before, and it isn’t tasty!

If you’re not a fan of cinnamon & sugar, you can also dress your toasted chickpeas up a variety of other ways. We have made them with garlic before, and I am sure there is a wide variety of flavors that you could come up with!

Be sure to also read Mike’s Cook’s Notes on Toasted Chickpeas, where he shares why they are made this way, and different flavor options you can use.