Who would have thought we’d still be eating tomatoes and eggplant in mid-May?

But since we are, my husband made baba ghanoush on Sunday, and we had a lovely Mediterranean meal of baba ghanoush, freshly baked bread, homemade goat cheeses, and chick pea salad.

I looked at a number of chick pea salad recipes on-line, then ignored them all and used what we had in the garden. The result was quite lovely.

1 cup dry chick peas

1 sweet red pepper, chopped

2-3 medium tomatoes, chopped

¼ cup chopped fresh parsley

12 large black olives

1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1 Tbsp balsamic vinegar

1 Tbsp red wine vinegar

salt and black pepper to taste

Cook the chick peas until tender, and allow to cool. Drain. Mix the chick peas, tomato, pepper, parsley and olives in a bowl. In a small bowl, whisk oil, vinegars, salt and pepper. Toss the salad with the oil and vinegar.

This salad holds up reasonably well to refrigeration (I just ate the last of it for lunch today, two days later, and it was still good), but is best eaten at room temperature on the first day.