Cheese is for the weak

Knowing what vegetables you’re using is also for the weak. Apparently. Because I just made a really nice pasta with some leafy greens of unknown identity – no idea what they were when I picked them up in the store, fried them in olive oil and garlic, or when I just took a bite – tasty though! So if you decide to make this recipe, I wholeheartedly recommend to go to the (super)market and choose something from the edible plants section that is made of leafs and is green (maybe not lettuce though…)

For those of you wandering what utensils I was using the eat my pasta: it’s a spoon.

Pasta with leafy greens and chickpeas

Ingredients for three people [1]
punnet of cherry tomatoes
pasta for three, ~225 g (I used a mix of wholewheat and plain fusili)
50-100g pine nuts (depends how nutty you want to be, harhar)
chili flakes
3 cloves of garlic, minced
leafy greens ~200 g
can of chickpeas
100 mL soy cream
2 tbsp nutritional yeast (= nooch)
olive oil, pepper, sail

Preheat the oven to 200*C (fan oven). Put cherry tomatoes in a roasting tray and drizzle over a good amount of olive oil, and sprinkle with pepper and salt. Once your oven is hot, bake the tomatoes for about 20 minutes. [2]

Boil your pasta for as long as it needs and add some salt and olive oil to the boiling water if you fancy feeling like you know what you’re doing. Drain when done and put the boiled pasta back into the pan. (You can do most of the rest of the recipe while the pasta boils.)

Put a large frying pan on medium heat and roast your pine nuts. Be careful to move them around in the pan almost constantly as they burn quickly. When they’re browned take them out and put aside for now. Heat up olive oil in the pan and fry some chili flakes and the minced garlic. Add the leafy greens and stir fry for five minutes on low to medium heat. Add the chickpeas (without the liquid [3]), salt and pepper and stir for a minute or so. Poor in the soy cream, stir in the yeast flakes, and leave on the heat for a bit longer so that the cream is warm as well. Then add the mixture and the roasted tomatoes (with roasting oil) to the pasta. [4] Done!

Notes

[1] You guessed it, me today, me at lunch time and another me in the near future! Unless you make me an offer now I suppose.
[2] If you like garlic, add a whole clove of garlic or two to the roasting tomatoes. I don’t think it matters much for the tomatoes but the roasted garlic is super nice to eat straight out of the skin.
[3] You can save the liquid from the can of chickpeas – it’s called aquafaba – and use it as an egg white replacement. I like to make chocolate mousse with it (melt some chocolate with a pinch of salt, whip up the aquafaba, then add some powdered sugar and whip some more until stiff, stir in the chocolate, divide over glasses or something and let set in the fridge overnight).
[4] It took me 20 minutes to cook this dish, which seems to imply that it took me zero minutes to prepare the tomatoes and mix everything together. I actually cut the oven time for the tomatoes a bit short because I was pretty hungry. If you want to time everything perfectly and not have your pasta get cold while you’re waiting for the tomatoes, I’d recommend waiting for five minutes after they’ve gone in the over before boiling the pasta and doing everything else.