Ciao chickpeas, and welcome to a fresh installment of On Repeat, in which we ask our favorite food pros about the meatless dishes they just can’t quit. This week, we’re diggin’ in with Jessica Merchant, author of the blog How Sweet Eats and four cookbooks, including Easy Everyday, which is out this month.
Her latest compendium is all about low-stress, fam-friendly dishes, like the light and bright lemon pasta with crunchy spiced chickpeas that she whips up all the time. “We’re getting into the warmer months of spring and summer, and I don’t want a heavy pasta dish to weigh me down,” she says. (Hear, hear!) The recipe also gets a cheesy kick from parmesan cheese, but you can swap in nutritional yeast or a plant-based parm to get a similar effect.
Why I love it
“It’s creamy without the cream, so it’s a little bit lighter and more refreshing. It’s still a cozy, comforting dish, but at the same time it’s light.
“I also love anything lemon. I feel like it’s so refreshing and wonderful when it’s in a savory dish. So I love making any sort of silky lemon sauce for pasta, and it’s just so easy to do. I’m also a really big texture person—I need some sort of crunch or texture in my life. So I love to do a crispy roasted chickpea.”
What I’ve changed
“You can use any seasonings you want [on the chickpeas]. You can do a smoky version; you can do more of an Italian-seasoned version; you can do a spicy version. It’s really whatever spices and seasonings you love and what you have on hand. You don’t have to go buy anything new.
“You could also definitely make this a clean-out-the-fridge meal. You could grab any vegetables that you didn’t use throughout the week—maybe leftover roasted vegetables. Pretty much any vegetable works because it’s such a simple, forgiving dish.”
Plus: My favorite planet-friendly practices
- Waste cutter. “I’m very into making a jam vinaigrette. I like to take the end of a jam jar—maybe you have a tablespoon left in there—and I make my vinaigrette right in that jar, shake it up, and it’s amazing. You can do this with any sort of preserves.”
- Produce prepper. “When I get my produce I will go ahead and chop and prepare my vegetables so they are ready to use. I do the same with fruit. My kids are huge fruit eaters, and if it’s all prepared, it’s not going to die in my crisper drawer—which happened all the time before I took this approach.”
- Leftover saver. “Easy Everyday has a chapter with my fridge essentials: all of my favorite dressings, vinaigrettes, sauces, pestos, hummuses… By making one or two of those on a Sunday, it can elevate meals throughout the week and take leftovers from being boring to being exciting.”