Don't you love one-pan dishes? This vegetarian meal is simple and quick to make, perfect for a weekday dinner. I started with Melissa Clark's New York Times recipe for orzo, spinach, and feta. I added chickpeas to make the dish more filling and olives to give it some zest.
This recipe serves 2 as a main dish and 4 as a side dish.
Ingredients
1 1/2 tablespoons
unsalted butter
3large scallions, white parts sliced thinly and green parts for
garnish
1large garlic clove or 2 small ones, minced 1
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 1/4 cups low-sodium chicken or vegetable stock
2/3 cup orzo
1/2 cup chickpeas
6 ounces baby spinach leaves (6 cups), coarsely chopped
1 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest plus 1-2 tsp lemon juice
to taste
1/2 cup crumbled feta (2 ounces) plus 1/4 cup for garnish
Optional:
1/2 cup chopped fresh dill
1/4-1/2 cup sliced Kalamata olives
Warm a 10-inch skillet over medium heat. Then melt the
butter in the pan. Add the garlic and white parts of the scallions. Stirring
often, cook until softened but not browned.
Add the spinach in batches with 1/4 teaspoon of salt. Cook,
stirring occasionally, until spinach wilts.
Add the stock. Heat it until the stock until it simmers.
Stir in the orzo, lemon zest, chick peas, and 1/4 teaspoon of salt. Cover and
simmer over low medium heat until the orzo is nearly cooked through and most of
the liquid absorbed, approximately 10 minutes. Stir a couple of times.
Add 1/2 cup of cheese and stir in the lemon juice (and the dill if using). Cover the pan, and
cook for another 1 minute.
Garnish with feta cheese.
Only after I tasted the dish did I realize it needed a bit more flavor. Since the ingredients are typical of Greek dishes, Kalamata olives seemed like the obvious choice.
The next time I make this dish, I'll wait to add the spinach until after the orzo is cooked so it's less limp.
As a side, this dish would go well with meat or fish, and/or a large green salad.
READERS: Do you have a favorite one-pan dish?
📚
Maya Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mystery series. It features a young cafe manager and her young-at-heart grandfather solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town. Each book has five suspects, five clues, and Granddad’s five-ingredient recipes. Maya has taught college courses in writing, literature, and detective fiction. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords.
Visit her website for book news, mystery history and trivia, and easy recipes. Sign up for her newsletter there. She gives away a free book to one subscriber each time she sends out a newsletter. Follow her on
Facebook.
A PARFAIT CRIME: Five-Ingredient Mystery #9
Set in a quaint Chesapeake Bay town, the latest novel in Maya Corrigan’s Five-Ingredient Mysteries brings back café manager Val Deniston and her recipe columnist grandfather – a sleuthing duo that shares a house, a love of food and cooking, and a knack for catching killers.
At the site of a fatal blaze, Val’s boyfriend, a firefighter trainee, is shocked to learn the victim is known to him, a woman named Jane who belonged to the local Agatha Christie book club—and was rehearsing alongside Val’s grandfather for an upcoming Christie play being staged for charity. Just as shocking are the skeletal remains of a man found in Jane’s freezer. Who is he and who put him on ice?
After Val is chosen to replace Jane in the play, the cast gathers at Granddad’s house to get to work—and enjoy his five-ingredient parfaits—but all anyone can focus on is the bizarre real-life mystery. When it’s revealed that Jane’s death was due to something other than smoke inhalation, Val and Granddad retrace the victim’s final days. As they dig into her past life, their inquiry leads them to a fancy new spa in town—where they discover that Jane wasn’t the only one who had a skeleton in the cooler.
Praise for A Parfait Crime
📚
