Quinoa and Roasted Vegetables

I made a new dish today that just sounded good. I had no recipe but this is very easy, especially if you have a rice cooker. Quinoa (pronounced Keen-wa) is an ancient grain from the Incas but it is really a seed. It has a very mild taste and you can use it for many things. This one is my new favorite, but my favorite before today was to mix in a little milk and berries for breakfast. Yum! Quinoa is very high in fiber (5 g in a one cup serving) and is considered a "complete" food as it has the right proportions of carbs/fats/protein and has all eight of the essential amino acids. I used red quinoa but it can come in several different colors with a light beige color as the most common.

You cook it just like rice. One part quinoa to 2 parts water (or broth). I used a rice cooker but I have also cooked on the stove just like rice. I roasted some veggies that I had on hand - one red bell pepper, two carrots, a small onion, and about a small handful of asparagus spears. If I had remembered, I think garlic would have made it even better. I did a rough chop in the food processor, but you could use your knife to chop. I was being lazy and Charles is cleaning up tonight! I added it to the cooked quinoa and topped with parmasean cheese. Charles loved it. Logan made gagging sounds but he does that to almost everything new so I didn't take it personally!

Good Eats!

Last night we had a fabulous dinner! We had pasta and a Chicken/Apple sausage that was very tasty. It was a little heavy and would be great in the winter. Then we had a salad that was made almost completely from things in the garden: cucumbers, cherokee tomato, basil, salt, red wine vinegar, and olive oil. It was the best salad all summer! Then today I finally bought a food processor. The first thing I did was roast a whole bunch of left over veggies laying around and pulverized them. I mixed the mash (garlic, onions, red bell pepper, asparagus, carrot and tomato) with an equal part of low fat sour cream and a bit of salt. Viola a great chip dip. That was today's lunch. I probably should have eaten the dip with cucumber (we have plenty - can you roast cucumber?), but the chips really hit the spot. I will put a few spoonfuls of the stuff in the fritatta that I will make tonight and serve it with a salad. It should be pretty good. Then tomorrow I will be harvesting basil again. That was one of the reasons for getting the food processor. I used a blender last time to process the basil and olive oil. It took an hour and was quite a mess. The herbs were not heavy enough to get down to the blades in the blender and I'll never do that again! So in a few days I will have a ton of ice cube shaped blocks of basil and oil. Hopefully I will get a few more harvests and will have enough basil to last the year.

Bon Appetite!

I was Glutened!

I was really dumb and ate something that I was pretty sure was not safe, but it seemed such a minuscule amount of gluten that I didn't think it would be a big deal. I had some CORN tortilla chips at a mexican restaurant. Normally they are okay from a bag of tortilla chips that are made in a factory, since that is the only thing fried in that oil. But in a restaurant they usually have one or two fryers that everything gets fried in. Gluten items included. So I had to have the salsa. This place has out of this world salsa! But I needed some way to get it into my mouth. I thought about the spoon, but thought it would not be setting a good example for Logan. So I grabbed a total of only THREE chips with loads of salsa. The next two days I had a headache. A very good sign that I had some gluten. But then I did something that I could not have foreseen the outcome. I took some Advil and with in minutes my tummy was on fire. No, the Advil is gluten free but I think the gluten damage caused in my intestines was intensified by the caustic effects of ibuprofen. It lasted for almost two days and I couldn't eat anything but rice and chicken broth. I am still having problems but hopefully it will be better tomorrow since it is my birthday. We are not officially celebrating it until Saturday. So the moral of the story is... If you are gluten intolerant eat the salsa from a spoon!