Dinner Party: Lemon Basil Chickpea Salad

Beautiful finished salad.

This is another recipe I tried out for the dinner party with our friend Steve and his parents.  Yep, I'm totally ok with using an untested recipe for guests, I like to fly by the seat of my pants.

I wanted something that I could throw together and the serving temperature didn't matter so I could focus on other dishes that needed attention at the last minute.  I thought I wasn't going to find anything, but I searched through my bookmarked recipes and finally found this chickpea salad.  I love a lemon juice and olive oil dressing that I've used for some other salads, so I at least knew what I was aiming for.

Browning onions.

Inspiration

Sel et Sucre Lemon Basil Chickpea Salad

The original recipe used hearty greens like kale, but I didn't want to scare anyone so I used a bag of salad greens instead.  I also cut back on the onion.

Ingredients

• 1 Tbsp olive oil
• 1/4 to 1/3 onion, minced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 bag salad greens (approximately 6.5 ounces, but more or less is fine)
• 28 – 32 oz canned chickpeas, drained and rinsed

lemon basil dressing

• 1/2 cup fresh basil (I used one of those larger plastic herb "clamshell" packages from the grocery store)
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 2 Tbsp lemon juice
• 1 Tbsp honey
• 1 Tbsp Dijon mustard
• 1 clove garlic, grated or minced
• salt and pepper, to taste

Dressing

Directions

Saute the onion over medium heat for about 10 minutes until it starts to brown and get nice and soft.

After that 10 minutes, add the garlic and cook for 1 minute.

Tip: Be careful when cooking garlic, it has a lot of sugars in it (that's why it's so sticky) and it can burn really quickly.   

Meanwhile, put the chickpeas in a large bowl.  (I put mine in my big serving bowl).

Dressing
Put all the ingredients together in an immersion blender cup and whiz it up until it's smooth. 

I was worried that it might be difficult to dress the salad so I put only a little bit of the greens in with the chickpeas and added about a third of the dressing and tossed.  Added more greens and more dressing, and tossed again.  Then the final bunch of greens and dressing. 

I know it looks like Nickelodeon's
green slime, but that's the lemon-basil dressing!

Verdict

Pleasant, but needed more bite.  

I'm more familiar with an equal mixture of lemon juice and olive oil but this was only half lemon juice to the amount of oil.  So to me it didn't feel tart enough and later I added more lemon juice to try to aim for that 50:50 ratio.    

The salad part was easy and I like that you could throw this together ahead of time.  If you're going to use delicate greens like I did, I would suggest mixing the greens in at the last minute so they don't get wilted.  Would be good for a summer potluck.