I took Jake to a nutritionist recently to find out how we were doing with his situation and to make sure he is getting the vitamins that he needs.  She was very nice, and overall she thought we were doing pretty well considering all of our food limitations (we are currently avoiding dairy, eggs, fish, shellfish, peanuts, tree nuts, and gluten due to food allergies and celiac disease).  She thought the main area we needed to work on was getting more grains into our diet.   So, this week I’ve been experimenting with quinoa, a gluten free grain that is high in protein.

Our friends Kevin and Sam bought us a cookbook for Christmas,  Tal Ronnen’s The Conscious Cook.  This is a vegan cookbook which is great for our family because the recipes contain no dairy or eggs.  Unfortunately the meat substitute that Tal Ronnen uses throughout this book is called gardein and one of the primary ingredients is wheat gluten, which we can’t eat.  Luckily, since we do eat meat, I can use most of the recipes anyway and when he calls for gardein just use chicken.   He does have some recipes that look great for us, and I finally tried one of them last night.  I tried the quinoa, avocado, and sweet potato timbal with roasted tomatillo dressing, and had it again for lunch today.

This recipe was really tasty.  We had red quinoa which I hadn’t tried before.  I cooked it in the rice cooker, 2 cups of water per 1 cup of quinoa and it came out perfectly.  The quinoa is topped with roasted sweet potatoes, avocado, and microgreens.  I wasn’t sure exactly what Tal Ronnin meant by microgreens, but the picture along with the recipe looked like little green sprouts.  The closest thing I found at Whole Foods was mache (pronounced mosh), also known as lamb’s lettuce.  The whole salad was topped with tomatillo dressing and a few crushed tortilla chips.    This has by far been our favorite quinoa recipe and I’m excited to try some others from this cookbook.

As a side note, Jeremy and I have been craving fresh greens (I never thought I’d say that about Jeremy), and the mache was very tasty, mild and a little bit sweet.  I made a plate for myself before dinner with a little olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper, and as I was eating it and Jacob came over and wanted some.  He ate three little florets of it.  This is the first raw lettuce that he has eaten and he liked it enough to come back for more!   I was shocked.  If he keeps liking it, I want to grow some next spring, it is a cold weather crop that in most areas (not sure about here) can be planted in the fall and overwintered for fresh early greens.  Yum!

A little video of Jacob being silly, to provide some Friday cheer!