An earthquake woke me up this morning. It was close to 5 a.m. and I was kind of jolted out of bed by this sort of grinding, sliding, hey my whole house is rockin' kind of feeling. It was weird. The USGS is reporting it was a 3.6, so it was fairly mild and the center was in Germantown/Gaithersburg, a couple miles up the road from my house.

Can't say I've ever experienced an earthquake before this morning. The shaking seemed to stop after a few minutes, but it was very weird.

I'm glad it was a rest day or else I would have been outside about to start my run. Now that would have been weird...running through an earthquake. Guess we'll save that experience for another day.

Onto this week's cooking challenge.

It's rare that I pull recipes from cookbooks. They usually have far too many weird ingredients that I don't have in my house and cost an arm and a leg at the grocery store. But I was running low on inspiration this week and pulled out an old cookbook I was sent to review back in my intern days at the paper.

I found this recipe for a Chickpea and Grain salad that used really simple ingredients and decided to give it a try.

All you need:
Can of chickpeas
2 cups of chicken (cut into chunks)
Spinach
Red Onion
Couscous/bulgur/pilaf (I used a wheat bulgur mix)

Follow the directions on your grain box to prepare that. Mine required boiling the grains and then letting them simmer for 20 minutes. (If you use couscous that will take five minutes).

While your grains are cooking, chop your red onion (I used about half of mine) and your spinach.





Throw them in a bowl and add the chickpeas and the chicken. (I cheated and used the precooked, packaged chicken to save time.)



When the grains are finished, throw them in the bowl and mix everything well.



Then top with a dressing of 3 tablespoons lemon juice and one tablespoon olive oil with some crushed red pepper.

Chill.

I actually really loved this salad and it made such a big batch, it's carried me through almost the whole week. The lemon juice did wonders in keeping everything fresh. I think my only slip up was not adding quite enough crushed red pepper.

Alright, I'm off to go find out who else felt this earthquake. Happy Friday!