An easy, flexible veggie packed chickpea casserole / tray bake which will clean out your fridge! Just roast veggies, add chickpeas and pesto, top with cheese and bake! Make this a hearty one pot vegetarian dinner with the addition of bread, or serve it as a side dish.
This recipe has been on repeat around here recently, because it requires very little thought or planning, just lots of veggie scraps, a jar of pesto, some canned chickpeas and cheese, and about an hour of your (mostly hands off) time.
It’s incredibly simple: we just roast some veggies, then add chickpeas and more veggies and stir through some pesto, top with cheese and bake. Flavor wise, the pesto does all the hard work here so we just don’t need much else.
The recipe you’re seeing today features sweet potato, green beans, peppers, tomatoes and kale, but this recipe can take almost any veggie you want to throw at it. You’ll get the best outcome if you try to make sure to incorporate a decent variety of textures, and a mix of sweet versus bitter veggies, but with that in mind, it’s yours to adapt freely!
Which veggies to use in this recipe
You will add the veggies to this recipe in two batches. The first batch are the harder veggies which will be roasted:
- Sweet potato or another root vegetable with a comparable cook time. The trick here is to cut the sweet potato until really small cubes to keep the cook time on par with the other veggies you include.
- Red or yellow pepper. If you want to use mini sweet peppers, go ahead, but slice them finely and add them alongside the cherry tomatoes rather than roasting them. They will burn before the sweet potato is ready.
- Green beans or thick stemmed asparagus.
- Broccoli, cut into medium sized florets. I’ve tried with broccolini and we just about got away with it, but the roasting times didn’t align perfectly with the sweet potato – it came out fairly singed by the time the sweet potato was ready (still edible, just not ideal).
- Cauliflower florets.
- Eggplant (aubergine) cubes.
- Mushrooms. Chopped portobellos or halved chestnut mushrooms work well, but with a caveat: they tend to release a lot of juices when they cook, which makes the other ingredients less likely to truly roast, crisp up or brown. When I tried this with mushrooms, my sweet potato fell apart a little rather than cooking into distinct cubes, but it was still good.
- Zucchini (courgette) would work, with the same caveat as the mushrooms, because they also leach a lot of liquid when they cook.
- Onions, cut into wedges. They need to roast in their wedges – individual slices of onion will burn by the time everything else is done.
The second batch are the softer veggies which will be added alongside the chickpeas and bake briefly. Choose veggies which are good to eat slightly warmed / wilted:
- Cherry tomatoes. I highly recommend adding some cherry tomatoes for the moisture they bring.
- Finely sliced mini peppers. They will stay a little crunchy.
- Kale, spinach, or arugula (rocket). I prefer kale here because it’s very bulky so it fills out the pan a little more.
Q. Can I use frozen veggies?
If you want to use SOME frozen veggies alongside the fresh ones: Cook them separately and then add them in alongside the chickpeas in Step 4. Frozen veggies will leach a lot of liquid when they cook, which could lead to the dish being watery.
If you want to use ONLY frozen veggies, then you could roast the larger ones (broccoli, squash, etc) straight from frozen. Doing this will take a little longer, and the veggies would end up soft instead of properly roasted (again, due to the excess liquid) but it would still turn out tasty enough.
Q. What kind of pesto works best for this recipe?
I am a big fan of homemade pesto, but with this recipe, jarred pesto works very well. It will have been heat treated, so the flavor won’t be too diminished from baking it. You can certainly use some leftover homemade pesto with this recipe, but you will find the fresh basil flavor lessens after it has been in the oven.
More Easy Dinner Ideas using Pesto
Pesto Chickpea Bake
Ingredients
- 1 small / medium sweet potato, peeled and chopped into small bite sized pieces
- 1 small red bell pepper or sweet pepper, sliced
- 6 oz (170 g) green beans, trimmed
- olive oil, for roasting
- salt and pepper, to taste
- 1 cup (150 g) cherry tomatoes, halved
- 2 cups (50 g) kale, chopped
- 6 tbsp prepared basil pesto, see notes
- 28 oz (800 g) canned chickpeas, drained and rinsed
- 2 cups (200 g) grated cheese, you can use cheddar, mozzarella or a blend
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 220C / 200C Fan / 400F.
- Add the sweet potato, green beans and peppers into a 9×13 casserole dish or roasting pan. Toss with olive oil and add salt and pepper to taste. The recipe's quantities are very approximate – focus on how the veggies fill the pan. You want to fill the bottom of the pan with veggies but keep it all in a single layer.
- Place in the oven for 20-30 minutes (turning once, at the halfway mark) until the sweet potato is soft. The green beans and peppers should be tender and browned. The time it takes will depend how crowded the pan is (the more crowded, the longer it will take to roast) and whether you use a metal or ceramic pan (metal is quicker).
- Add the chickpeas, cherry tomatoes and pesto. Toss through, until everything is well coated in the pesto.
- Add the kale and mix through.
- Add the cheese to the top and return to the oven for 10-15 minutes, until bubbling.
- Allow to sit out for about 5 minutes to set and cool before you cut in and serve.
