Quinoa Salad and Mache
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!
Tags: gluten free
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 8th, 2010 at 2:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
April 8th, 2010 at 8:15 pm
Yay for yummy recipes! Now I just need to come visit you, because I have a feeling I'll never actually get around to making it myself. Glad Jake liked the veggies!
April 9th, 2010 at 2:53 am
You do need to come and visit! Maybe I need to write a post on how to make your own heath bars and that will get you to CO
I was glad Jake liked his greens too!
April 9th, 2010 at 1:17 pm
Sounds delicious! Was the dressing complicated to make? It sounds impressive! I was going to tell you that I made the wild rice salad with a brown rice/wild rice mix. I think you could actually do it completely with brown rice if Jer doesn't like the wild. I think mostly why it's so tasty is because of the olive oil and spices
April 9th, 2010 at 2:07 pm
It actually wasn't too complicated, you just roasted the tomatillos in olive oil for about 10 min in the oven and then blended them up with more olive oil, cilantro and vinegar. I guess it did take longer than most salad dressings but it was really good!
Thanks for the tip on the wild rice salad! I'll have to try that. Maybe I can mix up the brown rice and ingredients for Jeremy and then add a little wild rice in mine
April 9th, 2010 at 3:05 pm
That tomatillo dressing sounds fantastic! By the way, I'm really impressed with how pretty your plate of food looks!
I really like it when you post about different greens you've tried. I'm limited on the kinds I can eat because most of them are too acidic after digestion, but I love them.
April 9th, 2010 at 5:57 pm
Thanks! I was pretty happy with it! Angie thought it was a picture from the book, so that made me really excited
Oh, you probably can't have spinach can you? Are there any you can have? These were really good, I wonder if you could have them. They might be hard to find though, I'd never seen them before.
April 12th, 2010 at 1:32 pm
I thought it was a book picture also, but I know you guys have plates like that so I figured it was yours
The results on spinach are conflicting, but most point to acid forming. I can have mustard, collard, chard, and most "wild" greens. However, most of those are pretty bitter when eaten raw. What do you think the vendors at the FM would say if I asked them if their veggies were alkaline or acid forming?
April 12th, 2010 at 2:41 pm
LOL, they'd probably just look at you funny. Who knows though some might know what you're talking about. We are growing mustard and arugula this year, our farm gave us a mix that they sell to a restaurant, it is a "spicy greens" mix and had mustard, arugula and I think mizuna? We got really used to eating that, it was a little bitter but mostly just spicy.
We are also growing kale, not sure if you can have that, but it's really good cooked I think.