Bethany's Vegan Kitchen

This dish combines orzo, chickpeas and vegetables, in a flavourful tomato sauce. It’s hearty and filling, and only takes 20 minutes to cook, so it would be ideal for a quick midweek meal

Yield: Four servings Cook time: 20 minutes

You’ll need:

1. One tablespoon of oil
2. One red onion, finely diced
3. Two cloves of garlic, minced
4. 300g (this is the dry, uncooked weight) orzo
5. 300g cherry tomatoes, halved
6. Two tablespoons of tomato puree
7. 800ml hot vegetable stock
8. A 50g mix of spinach, rocket and watercress, roughly chopped
9. 300g chickpeas, this is one and one third of a tin of chickpeas, or 125g dried chickpeas, cooked. Here’s how I cook chickpeas
10. 35g grated parmesan-style dairy-free cheese, I used Prosociano by Violife

Method:

• Start by heating the oil in a large frying pan over a medium heat. Once it’s warmed up, add the red onion and cook for five minutes. Then add the garlic and cook for another couple of minutes
• Next, add the orzo into the frying pan and stir it through the onion and garlic. Toast the orzo for a couple of minutes, or until it starts to smell a little nutty
• Then add the cherry tomatoes, tomato puree and hot vegetable stock into the frying pan, give everything a good stir to combine
• Allow the orzo to simmer in the stock for 8 minutes, stir often as the orzo tends to try to stick to the bottom of the frying pan
• Finally add in the chickpeas and grated cheese, then give the chickpeas another couple of minutes to heat through, again stirring often

You can use tinned chickpeas to make this, I prefer to make my own from dried chickpeas. I’ve included how I cook dried chickpeas in the ingredients list above. I tend to go through chickpeas fairly quickly, as I cook with them often. So I find soaking and cooking dried chickpeas is a cheaper option than buying tinned chickpeas