Vegan Chickpea Vegetable Chowder

This vegan chickpea vegetable chowder is satisfying and delicious. It’s made with chickpeas, potatoes and carrot for a bit of a twist on classic vegetable chowder. Blend half the soup for a thick and chunky, hearty soup you’ll want to eat all winter long. This soup is low in fat, gluten-free, oil-free, sugar-free, inexpensive to make and ready in under 30 minutes with basic, everyday ingredients.

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Benefits of Chickpeas

Chickpeas, or garbanzo beans, are loaded with protein, iron, zinc, fibre, folate and potassium, making them gram for gram, one very nutritious food . In 2007, the America Institute for Cancer Research published one of the most comprehensives studies on cancer and diet ever done. Their findings resulted in a cancer-prevention recommendation to eat legumes not only on a daily but at every meal! This includes beans (including soy beans), chickpeas, lentils and split peas.

Eating beans at lunch and dinner is easy but what about breakfast? Well, it’s actually very easy too if you get a little creative! How about adding some mashed cannellini beans to your oatmeal, or some black beans to a chocolate smoothie, or trying my chickpea breakfast cookies or sweet potato breakfast bowls?

Then there’s always the classic beans on toast, which you can make a little more interesting by adding mashed avocado. Tempeh, or fermented soybean, is really nice at breakfast too, you can dry-fry it in a pan until crispy.

As for snacks, roasted chickpeas, edamame, hummus and black bean dip all make it easy to include a serving of beans in your day. Shell peas also make a great snack just on their own. Try them in the late spring when they’re in season and at their peak of deliciousness.

Vegan Chickpea Vegetable Chowder

This chickpea vegetable chowder is really easy to make and is great for the end of the week when you might need to clean out the fridge and want to keep things simple and comforting. It takes under 30 minutes to make from start to finish and it keeps well so it can be made in advance and enjoyed for up to 5 days.

It’s made with plenty of nutritious but inexpensive vegetables such as onion, garlic, celery carrots and potatoes making it a good immunity-boosting soup to enjoy throughout the winter. I’d recommend using a yellow-fleshed potato such as Yukon gold but you can also use russet potato. I blended about 1/2 of the soup to give it that creamy chowder consistency but leave plenty of chunky vegetables in every bite.

Let it blend for a while for an ultra-creamy, chowder base for the chunky veggies left behind. I used my Vitamix which resulted in a beautifully smooth soup but any blender works fine, you might just need to let it blend a little longer.