Roasted Chickpea and Tomato Salad

I found a unicorn today!

A recipe whose time estimate was accurate (and I even had enough downtime to almost finish cleaning before it was done!)

I am in general slow at prep, which means steps often take a lot longer than the recipe estimates and I end up with things like the oven on and heated well before I'm ready, or the pan getting too hot. I usually compensate by front loading the prep steps, even if the recipe calls for doing some of the prep concurrently.

Today's recipe is courtesy of Mealime, https://app.mealime.com/#/meals/3792935. I'm not sure if you can get to this link without signing up, but if you can't, it's called "Roasted Chickpea & Tomato Salad with Arugula & Feta" and you should sign up for Mealime because it is a wonderful site and the base version is free. It lets you pick your meal types (I've got pescetarian because of my husband), how many people, how many portions, how many meals, and generates a meal plan and grocery shopping list for you. You can swap out meals before you commit to your meal plan if some of them obviously won't work for you. With the paid version, you can choose to include previous favorites in your plan and track nutrition/content, and a bunch of other features. I've been using it approximately every other week for a while now.


On to the unicorn.

Ingredients
 - Spinach (original recipe called for arugula, store didn't have any)
 - Feta or bleu cheese (I've tried them both, I think I like feta better on this salad).
 - ~30 oz garbanzo beans (1 big can or two small ones)
 - 1 medium onion (originall recipe called for red; I used yellow)
 - 3 cloves of garlic
 - 1 pint cherry tomatoes
 - 1 lemon
 - Salt, pepper, dijon mustard, olive oil, oregano (Original recipe calls for 1 tsp mustard, 1 tsp oregano, 1/4 tsp salt, 1/4 tsp pepper, and 4 tbsp olive oil. I don't measure.)

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees
2. Rinse/drain chickpeas
3. Slice onion into half rings.
4. Wash and cut tomatoes in half
5. Put chickpeas, tomatoes, onion on baking sheet. Drizzle with olive oil and season with salt and pepper.
 6. Roast the veggies for 10-15 minutes until the chickpeas are golden and popping. Mine took closer to 15 minutes.
 7. Peel/mince garlic. Put in a small bowl
 8. Juice the lemon into the bowl with the garlic
 9. Add salt, pepper, mustard, oregano, and olive oil to the bowl. Mix well.
 10. Add spinach, cheese, and roasted veggies to a salad bowl and toss. Serve with the dressing.


Some notes from the recipe:
 - The original recipe calls for drying the chickpeas before roasting. This is probably a good idea. I dried them some after rinsing but they were still a bit soggy when I pulled them out of the oven.
 - I prefer feta to bleu cheese in this recipe. Usually I like bleu better. I would probably be ok with either if I roasted the cheese with the vegetables, which is what I will try next time.
 - I like garlic, so i threw in an extra clove.
 - I drizzled a bit too much olive oil on veggies. It wasn't too bad but they would have roasted better if I'd been lighter.
 - Spinach works just fine in place of arugula. I imagine any other greens would too.
 - I accidentally at least doubled the mustard. It came out fine, although if you don't like mustard it wouldn't be a good dressing for you.


I will definitely make this again. I had everything I used in prep work washed and dried before the chickpeas came out of the oven. It was great!