Roast Pumpkin and Chickpea Salad

Roast Pumpkin and Chickpea Salad
Home Cooking



It recently came to my attention that I am not eating enough vegetables. Aside from garden salad as a side to food I order from restaurants, I seem to eat no vegetables at all.

To rectify, I decided to put together a salad... a NUTRITIOUS salad as one of my contributions to a recent dinner party we hosted.



I kept thing simple and plain old Googled a pumpkin and chickpea recipe. The reason behind this is that I love pumpkin and I spotted a can of chickpeas in my cupboard.


Pumpkin and chickpea is a classic combination. Like basil and tomato. Or sour cream and sweet chili. There were a million recipe results online and I think I just picked the first one.

Roast Pumpkin and Chickpea Salad
Serves 4-6 as a side

Ingredients:

• 1/2 butternut pumpkin
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tsp ground coriander
• salt and pepper
• 1 red onion, thiny sliced
• 1 x 400g can of chickpeas, drained
• zest and juice of 1 lemon
• 2 tbsp of extra virgin olive oil
• small handful of cordiander leaves, roughly chopped
• extra coriander to garnish

Buying whole spices = extra muscle work

Procedure:

1. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius. Cut the pumpkin into 2cm cubes. Coat the pumpkin with the cumin, coriander, salt and pepper. Place in a baking tray and drizzle with oil. Roast for around 30min or until cooked.2. Make the dressing by combining the lemon juice, lemon zest and olive oil with some salt and pepper.3. Toss the roasted pumpkin, chickpeas, onion, coriander and dressing together. Season if required.
4. Serve with some torn fresh coriander leaves.


This was such an easy salad to do. The hardest part was roasting the pumpkin and really, all that takes is patience.


This salad can be eaten warm, right after the pumpkin is roasted, or cold. I even tried microwaving the left overs and that worked too... seamed to make it heartier. It's good for Winter but the lemony dressing keeps things light and fresh.

We had this as a side dish but pumpkin and chickpea is solid and substantial enough to have as a main meal.