BBC Good Food Spicy Chickpeas

Every so often I go through the head space that I need to eat healthily because I'm fat.  It's usually after some event or another - Christmas, Easter, general bad times.  I stop running and I start eating too much of the wrong thing.  The two things always go hand in hand.  If I'm running, I'm perfectly okay with an end of day treat of four squares of Green and Blacks.  If I'm not running, I'll just eat the whole bar there and then.  This happened yesterday with a bar of almond chocolate.  I hate myself for it.

Over the years, I've used Graze boxes (this is not a sponsored post!) to deal with my snacking needs when I'm on a health jag.  They're great and I love the idea of getting random 'treats' sent through the post.  Except they're expensive and in this new world of semi-thrift that I inhabit, they don't really fit into the budget very well.  So, I decided on a bit of a whim this evening to look into making home made snacks of my own.

After just one experiment, I've concluded it would be simpler to run more and eat less cake/chocolate/crisps (which is a general no brainer).  I happened across a recipe on the Good Food website for spicy chickpeas.  In a chickpea shell (see what I did there?), you bake a tin of chickpeas with a few spices for half an hour et voila - you'll never want another bag of crisps again.

Sadly, they're not peanuts.

Au contraire mes petit pois.  Actually, I really would rather run and then go without this snack.  Maybe I'm just fussy or I didn't cook them right but I had a weird combination where some chickpeas were still soggy - despite roasting at 200C for 30 minutes; some had a hard outside and a squashy middle; and none of them tasted like anything other than lumpy hummous (or rather chickpeas with seasoning).  Really not my idea of a tasty snack.  I'm going to road test them on Miss A tomorrow to see if I can convince her to like them so they don't go to waste.  If not, I know what the dogs are having for tea.

Of course, not all home made 'diet' food is so rubbish.  I've found two good, healthy(ish) snack recipes since doing this challenge - the first being Kale Chips and the second being Guilt Free Brownies.  But at the end of the day, for me it's definitely everything in moderation and lots of running.  And getting over the denial that I'm no longer in post-race recovery mode and I need to lose some serious weight ready for my next half marathon attempt.

Therefore, I declare the month from the Tuesday after Easter 'Healthy Eating Month' on the blog.  More veggies, less butter, less cakeage.  What a fun month that will be.  *Pout*

Anyway if you want to try the recipe, you'll find it here.