Cooking After Class: Chickpea Pasta with Beef Ragu

For dinner tonight, I served a delicious, quick and easy Moroccan spiced pasta with beef ragu recipe. The recipe called for beef ragu but I substituted venison instead to make it a bit healthier. The pasta was a hit and Xander went back for seconds 🙂

My girls do not like raisins so I didn’t broadcast their addition to this recipe. They didn’t even know there were any in this pasta until they had nearly cleaned their plates. Lexie was on her last bite and noticed one on her plate. They added a nice texture and sweetness to the dish and after she noticed it, she actually continued to eat it with her last bite. The raisins really fit in well with the flavor profile so I would keep them in this recipe even if you’re feeding someone that typically doesn’t care for raisins by themselves. Just my two sense 🙂

I’ve linked the recipe below that I attempted to follow but I did make numerous substitutions tonight. That’s one of the nice things about this pasta dish…it’s really hard to mess it up to the point where it tastes bad. You can be pretty flexible with ingredients to use up what you have or change it slightly to cater to your taste. I have made this pasta before and while it was tasty both times, it wasn’t the exact same dish.

Substitutions/Additions for Chickpea Pasta with Beef Ragu:

used penne pasta because I had an open box in the pantry
eliminated the oil
used two peppers, one orange and one yellow (any sweet bell pepper would work perfectly)
regular raisins instead of golden raisins
I didn’t have the ras el hanout so I used equal parts paprika, coriander, and ginger