The blogger Feed Yourself has a recipe for a red-white quinoa pilaf that I’ve been eyeing for a while now. I had a piece of steak at home but no sides, so I figured this wouldn’t be bad. I could seal up any extra in a microwave container and take it to work. I was confident enough in my ability to cook quinoa and quickly, and I’ve cooked veggies similar to this in oil before. I just had to combine these steps in a couple different ways. Course, I’ve never made any pilaf ever, much less a quinoa pilaf. What the heck, worth a try.
I was too hungry to worry with cleaning up my red quinoa, so what I made was purely a white quinoa base. I had never taken quinoa so low in water that it wasn’t at least oatmeal-like in texture, so I spent a lot of time watching that bowl with a “is it done yet?” eye. I should not have worried so much.. it dried up just fine. I took it off the heat and fluffed it.
I cut up too much parsley, and my vegetables are hardly chopped fine. I tossed in some cilantro too, about a half handful – I’m a big pico de gallo nut and I’d probably tossed in pico if I could have found some. I misplaced my measuring spoons so had to guess with my spices using a baby spoon, but it all seemed to be pretty invulnerable to any fumbles on my part.
The pilaf is tasty and simple to make.
I took about half of it to eat with my dinner, a suprisingly good piece of leftover steak, along with some Jumex guava nectar I snagged while buying soft drinks for my wife. The rest of it I put in a microwave container. It’s going to become lunch, or perhaps a dinner side sometime.
The cleanup was a bit messier than I was used to. Soups tend to clean themselves but green bits of parsley were everywhere. The pan I cooked the quinoa in also had quinoa stuck here and there, but cleaning out a quinoa pot has a lot of the same pleasure I recall from cleaning up the cake mix out of bowls in my youth.
Check out Feed Yourself’s recipe. Definitely recommended.
