Roasted Chick Pea & Carrot Salad

It's my favourite kind of dish: something that looks fancy, but is really no more difficult to put together than any other salad. The extra requirement is simply a little roasting time. This would be a good dish for New Year's Eve or New Year's Day, when lots of people eat beans for good luck. They represent little coins, perhaps, and the carrot slices will reinforce that idea very well.

You could serve a simple protein dish with this salad, but some nice crusty bread would make it a meal in itself.

If you can only get pumpkin seeds that are already roasted and salted, don't add them in to the vegetables to be roasted, but put them in with the lettuce. I'd cut the salt back quite a bit too, in that case. 

4 to 6 servings
1 hour - 15 minutes prep time

Roast the Vegetables:
1 540 ml (19 ounce) chick peas
250 grams (1/2 pound) medium sized but thin carrots
3 or 4 shallots
1/3 cup raw pumpkin seeds
3 tablespoons sunflower OR olive oil
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cumin seeds, ground
freshly ground black pepper to taste
1/2 teaspoon Aleppo pepper

Preheat the oven to 400°F. 

Rinse and drain the chick peas well. Scrub or peel the carrots, trim them, and cut them into slices not too much larger than the chick peas. Peel and sliver the shallots. Toss them all on a large baking tray with the raw pumpkin seeds and the oil.

Grind the cumin with the salt then mix in the pepper and Aleppo pepper. Sprinkle over the vegetables and toss again.

Roast for 20 to 30 minutes, stirring once in the middle, until done to your liking. Put the tray on a rack and let them cool for another 15 minutes.

Finish the Salad:
the juice of 1/2 large lemon
1 tablespoon sunflower OR olive oil
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
half a bunch of greenhouse lettuce OR 2 cups pea or sunflower greens
  OR 1/2 cup chopped parsley and other herbs

Juice the lemon and mix it with the oil and mustard while the vegetables are roasting. As they cool, mix the dressing in with them.

Wash and dry the lettuce, and chop it fairly finely. Toss it with the cooled vegetables and transfer everything to a serving platter. Serve at once.

Lettuce could be replaced with pea or sunflower micro-greens, or if making this in the spring, with parsley and a touch of chives, cilantro, dill, or mint.




Last year at this time I made Oyster Mushroom Chowder with Saffron

Posted in: Ontario Food