Quick Lunch Series: Greek Chickpea-Mango Pasta Salad

I normally prefer to use dry beans in my cooking. But this requires plenty of lead time to plan, soak, and cook the beans before you can use them. For this reason, I do keep a few cans of organic beans around. This is especially useful when I am stumped for what to prepare for the next day office lunch. This one is adapted from here. I had no artichoke hearts, instead, I swapped in some mango. Also, I decided to use more chickpeas and less pasta.

Ingredients:
1 can garbanzo beans (aka Chickpeas)
1/2 cup whole wheat elbow pasta
1/2 mango chopped
1/2 cup black olives sliced
1/2 cup feta cheese
4-6 sun dried tomatoes sliced
1-2 tbsp sliced red onion (optional)
1 tsp dried oregano
a few red pepper flakes
salt and fresh ground pepper

Cook the pasta according to directions. Drain and set aside to cool.

Drain and rinse the chickpeas.

In a large bowl, toss together the chickpeas, pasta, sun dried tomatoes, red onion, mango, olives, artichokes if using, dried oregano, red pepper flakes, salt and fresh ground pepper. Use oil from artichokes or sun dried tomatoes if using oil soaked varieties. Else drizzle some olive oil.

Chill or serve immediately topped with some fresh feta cheese. Delicious!