Green Vegetable and Chickpea Salad with Pesto (Vegan)

When we first arrived in The Netherlands, we lived in a short-stay apartment with a beer fridge as its actual fridge. It wasn't really a beer fridge, of course, but the idea that something so small could be considered sufficient for a kitchen was alien to me.

Due to the space restriction, and our tendency to eat a lot of fresh vegetables, we ended up shopping once every 2-3 days. It was on the third day of one of these shopping units that we discovered that it was a public holiday. Our fridge contained half a jar of pesto, half a can of chickpeas, the wilted ends of a bag of spinach, and a little bit of broccoli and beans that were left over from the stir fry the night before. Oh, and some soy milk. We didn't even have any onions - just some garlic cloves. That was literally all there was to eat in the house.

And so I threw them all together, sans soy milk. What resulted what rather delicious, defying the expectations that I had had when I'd first looked into the fridge. Since then, I've tried to recreate the meal on multiple occasions, making various improvements, but it's never quite been right. So today I decided to put myself back in that position, imagining exactly what I had at the the and how I cooked it. Lo and behold, there it was again. It turns out that all the "improvements" that I made with a well-stocked fridge were actually the problem. As much as I felt the recipe needed onion, it really did not. Finally, after months of remembering nostalgically the Meal of Desperation, it has come into existence once again. And shall now be permanently - or as permanently as a cloud-based system for storing the sum total of human knowledge can be - be scribed for the world to recreate.

Green Vegetable and Chickpea Salad with Pesto

Serves 2

Ingredients
8 cloves of garlic
A good handful of green/string beans (100 grams or so)
One third to one half of a head of broccoli
Oil for frying
7-8 tablespoons pesto* (to taste - exact amount not required)
0.5 - 1 can of chickpeas
Spinach to serve (I suggest you wash and dry it before starting on the other stuff because there isn't a lot of downtime)
Salt to taste

* If you're new to veganism, or cooking for a vegan, be aware that some pesto contains cheese. Just check the label.

Method
1. Slice the garlic into thin pieces. Not too small, like if you were mincing it - more like you would slice a carrot, into rounds, only much, much thinner.
2. Cut the beans. I do 3-4cm slices, but hey, whatever's your favourite metric or imperial bean measurement will be fine.
3. Cut the broccoli into fairly small pieces. I cut each floret into 4-6, depending on the size.
4. Heat the oil on a medium-low heat in some kind of cookware. In the shower kitchen I used a saucepan. This time I used my cast iron pot. Other times I have used a frying pan. (Admittedly, the other times haven't been as good, but I don't think this can be ascribed to the pan.)
5. Add the garlic. Fry until soft. Try not to burn the garlic - I find keeping the heat fairly low is best.
6. Add the beans and broccoli. Fry for a couple of minutes.
7. As soon as the garlic starts sticking, add the pesto. Mix around with the veges for a few more minutes.
8. As soon as the pesto starts sticking (see how technical I am?), add the chickpeas. They will need to be drained first, but if they're not perfectly drained that's fine - a little bit of liquid will stop the stickiness.
9. It is done once everything is heated up and the veges are cooked but still crunchy. (They tend to go bright green, but trying to determine their greenness is a bit like noticing your own hair growing. If someone doesn't see you for a while, they're like, "Wow, your hair's grown heaps!", whereas you won't really have noticed. If you want to employ this method of determining your vegetables' cookedness, ask a helpful assistant to come and look at the vegetables before you start cooking, and then call them over every so often and ask if they seem brighter. Bear in mind that they stay bright up until the point where they are inedibly mushy, so your assistant will have to be very onto it. All things considered, I'd just do a taste test. Does the bean seem edible? Yes? Good.)
10. Serve on a bed of spinach. You may need salt to taste - I prefer it quite salty but it will depend on the brand of pesto and your own salt tolerance. Once you've cooked it a couple of times and you know how salty you like it, you can add in the salt between stages 8 and 9.