Ingredients
- 5 onions
- 2 cloves garlic
- 1 cup rice
- 1 cup dry green or brown lentils
- 1 cup dry chickpeas
- 1 cup macaroni
- 1 can chopped tomatoes
- 2tbsp coriander
- 1 cup oil
- 2 tbsp white wine vinegar
- salt
Prep
Soak the chickpeas and lentils overnight. If you have a pressure cooker, it's a good idea to boil the chickpeas separately. If you don't, maybe use canned chickpeas, otherwise it takes like two hours to cook them.
Wash the rice thoroughly (and maybe soak it for an hour before you start cooking, could be a good idea).
Instructions
Slice four onions and fry them in oil over a low heat, stirring regularly, for about an hour and a half. These will be used as a topping, and if you want to save time you could use crispy onions, but they're the best part of the dish so maybe don't.
Finely chop half of an onion. Heat two tbsp of oil in a pot and grate the garlic cloves into it. Before the garlic burns, add in a tablespoon of coriander and the finely chopped onion, along with a pinch of salt. Fry these for another two to five minutes, then add the chopped tomatoes and cook on medium heat for up to an hour. At the end, add vinegar to taste.
Chop the other half of the onion. Fry it in some oil, then add a tablespoon of coriander. Add the lentils and plenty of water (or even vegetable stock if you want) and cook them for however long the packet says.
Once they're boiling, you need to decide when to add the rice and when to add the pasta. As an example, I might go by the lentils needing 30 minutes to cook, so I'll add the rice ten minutes later and the pasta ten minutes before the end so that the rice is soft and the pasta al dente. Your preferences might be different, and my memory isn't reliable, so take these timings with a grain of salt.
The other thing to work out is how much salt to add. If I'm using vegetable stock I might not even add any, but pasta needs salt so that's probably wrong. Start with a pinch and reassess halfway through the cooking time.
Once the rice, lentils and pasta is cooked, spread the mixture onto a serving tray. Top with boiled chickpeas, tomato sauce and fried onions.