Adventures in Cooking: Quinoa

I don't normally make New Year's resolutions, but this year was, kind of coincidentally, an exception. A few days before 2019 began, I took stock of my eating habits and concluded that the largest portion of my protein intake came from cheese. Now, far be it from me to knock this most wonderful of foods, but I did decide it wouldn't hurt to cut down on the cheese and focus more on lean – ideally vegan – protein sources.

And thus began my relationship with quinoa. While I was cleaning out the kitchen cabinets in a post-Christmas organizing frenzy, I found a 2-quart carton of uncooked quinoa, a holdover from one of my boyfriend's many brief flings with ambitious cooking. I don't recall what recipe he tried to make with quinoa, but he never made it again, and the quinoa has been sitting in the cabinet for at least a year since then. Quite convenient for me, since quinoa is practically a vegan superfood. It has one of the highest protein contents of any grain, and it's a rare vegetarian source of all 9 essential amino acids. Unfortunately for me, it is also unappetizing to the extreme.

When prepared, quinoa resembles nothing so much as a bowl of coarse sand. It has no flavor to speak of, so consuming it is only slightly more appealing than eating said sand. It's slightly more chewable than sand, but being likewise comprised of tiny particles, it doesn't provide anything satisfying to bite into.

There are many recipes on the internet for quinoa, but like any good Adventurer, I decided to go my own way. The first time I prepared the stuff, I followed the simplest cooking instructions (1 part quinoa, 2 parts water, boil until the seeds have absorbed all the water). I figured I'd flavor it with cumin and fresh cilantro and have a quick 15-minute sort-of-Mexican meal. And I did! But it was so boring, I could barely choke it down. In spite of all the spices and all the salt (and more salt! And more!), my healthy dish was as bland as health food is reputed to ever be.

The next time I made the quinoa, I followed an actual recipe. It called for sauteed greens and curry powder. The greens added texture (a slimy, stringy one, of course), but I still felt like the soul was being sucked out of me with every bite.

The third time I made quinoa, I decided to really rock the boat and mix it with cashews! While not as low-fat as pure quinoa, at least a few cashews scattered throughout the bowl would give me something solid to bite into from time to time. The spice rack did not offer any inspiration as to how to season my delicious dish, so I consulted Google and came up with a mix of garlic and turmeric. I threw in some more dried cilantro leaves for the heck of it. And salt. More salt! 

 

 

The turmeric gave the quinoa a bright yellow color, so at least it looked fun, even if it wasn't going to be any fun to eat. And it wasn't. But it was better than my first batch. Either the turmeric or the cashews or perhaps both imparted a slightly sweet flavor, that made the eating interesting, if not exactly delicious.

The going has been ploddingly slow, but I'm learning something about cooking quinoa. The best way to enjoy quinoa is to just make sure you eat it with a lot more stuff that's not quinoa! My next Adventure in Cooking is totally going to be quinoa-sprinkled ice cream!