With lemon and garlic, this pasta with chickpeas and swiss chard is a simple vegetarian meal that’s filling and ready in about 15 minutes.
There are two things my pantry is never without, at least one box of pasta and a can of chickpeas.
They are staples around our house, but I usually don’t cook them together.
When I think pasta, it’s garlic, olive oil, tomatoes and sometimes mushrooms or olives.
For chickpeas, I love spreading them out on a sheet pan and roasting them with sweet potatoes until the chickpeas are golden and crispy and the sweet are browned at the edges.
Last week was another busy one, and I didn’t do my regularly scheduled grocery run.
Instead I used what I had left in my weekly veggie box and raided my cabinets.
I figured why not pair pasta and chickpeas. Except it had to involve one cooking apparatus. There would be no preheating the oven.
I kept everything on the stove for this pasta with chickpeas and swiss chard.
A skillet and a splash of olive oil all that I needed to cook the garbanzo beans.
When I roast chickpeas in the oven, it takes about a half hour for them to get crunchy.
Spending that kind of time on an ingredient for a quick pasta dish just didn’t make sense. They needed to be fast, too.
After I opened the can of garbanzo beans and rinsed them off in a colander, I patted them dry with a paper towel and removed any loose skins.
This helps the chickpeas crisp up in the skillet. I love that texture contrasting with the spaghetti and the wilted chard.
To start, I put a pot on the stove and cooked the spaghetti.
On the next burner, I heated olive oil in a skillet.
Then I added the chickpeas and sauteed them gently shaking the pan, so they would brown on all sides. Some were darker than others in spots, but I didn’t mind.
After the chickpeas, I squeezed in the juice of a lemon and added a couple minced garlic cloves.
It took less than a minute for the garlic to become fragrant.
I put the swiss chard into the skillet. Soon it wilted.
By then the spaghetti was al dente, so I folded it with the rest of the ingredients.
With a generous sprinkle of salt and pepper and shaved Parmesan, my pasta with chickpeas and swiss chard was ready for dinner.
With lemon and garlic, this pasta with chickpeas and swiss chard is a simple vegetarian meal that’s filling and ready in about 15 minutes.
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