Quinoa with Spinach, Goat Cheese, and Sauteed Shiitakes

I don't know about you but sometimes I crave veggies with a vengeance.  And after a weekend of stuffing my face, all I wanted was something between a salad and a pile of cooked veggies.  This dish fit the bill nicely (and coincidentally was one of the first few recipes that really drew my eye in my new Jean-Georges cookbook).  Quinoa is a lovely healthy grain that Alex and I don't make nearly enough of.  I also feel the same way about shiitake mushrooms (although it's obviously not a grain).  So this dish combined two of my favorite underutilized ingredients in a wonderful way.  I was afraid the dish might be a bit bland, but it was surprisingly tasty.  I really should have known better than to doubt Jean-Georges Vongerichten!  No one component of the dish really stood out for me, but I really enjoyed the combination of woodsy, meaty shiitakes, creamy goat cheese and nutty quinoa. Our goat cheese tasted faintly lemony to me, which I thought was nice.  The flavors are somewhat subtle (with the exception of the sauteed shiitakes which have a really deep and rich flavor to them), but they work together beatuifully.  Toasting the quinoa to make it a little nuttier and give it a little more texture was a great touch.  Hurray for a healthy vegetarian meal!  Over the next few weeks I am definitely planning on a few more healthy vegetarian meals until I atone for all of my recent gluttony.  Vegetables and whole grains, here I come.

Recipe after the jump!

Quinoa Cakes

I feel like blog posts about these quinoa cakes have been storming the internet recently, so I'm not going to write a super detailed post, when you could find one here, here or here.  And the more I saw about the quinoa cakes the more interested I was in making them.  I came to the conclusion thatAlex and I should explore some healthy recipes now that it's summer and all, and what could be more healthy than quinoa?  I really enjoyed the texture of the cakes - you got a nice crispy exterior and a nice soft interior.  And I thought they tasted nice and were very satisfying.  However, I think that these cakes would be even better if there was some sort of sauce.  Something to give them a little more flavor and moisture.  I saw people putting fried and poached eggs on top of their quinoa cakes and that sounds like a nice option, but we had scrambled eggs for breakfast and there are already 4 eggs in these bad boys, so I just wasn't feeling the whole egg on top routine.  We served the quinoa cakes with this sugar snap pea salad for a nice healthy lunch.

Recipe after the jump!

Sauteed Swiss Chard over Quinoa

 

After a few gluttonous weeks, I felt the need for a simple, vegetarian meal with whole grains.  I knew I wanted to use quinoa as the grain and after scanning my stash from the CSA I figured I would use some Swiss chard and throw in some garlic scapes for fun.  I also thought about poaching one of the farm fresh eggs that I also picked up from the CSA, but decided that was more ambitious than necessary.  However, I have done almost this exact same sauteed Swiss chard recipe over toasted crusty bread and topped it with a poached egg and it was delicious.

Recipe after the jump!

Lamb Kebobs and Quinoa Tabouli

Traditionally tabouli (or tabouleh) is almost all vegetables with very little fine bulgar.  Since I don't have any bulgar in the apartment, but I do have quinoa, I decided to substitute quinoa for the bulgar and ramp up the amount of quinoa a bit to make the salad a little heartier without messing with the traditional flavors of tabouli.  I love the freshness of the tabouli, so I didn't want to mess with that at all.  I just wanted to make it into more of an entree salad and less of a side dish.  Plus I really love the taste of quinoa, so I wanted to make sure that it didn't get lost in all of the vegetables.

Generally I design my meals around the protein, but this time the quinoa tabouli came first and then I had to decide what protein to serve with the tabouli.  Kebabs seemed like a natural choice.  Luckily I had some ground lamb in the freezer that I have been talking about using for a week or two now.  So I threw together some ingredients for the kebabs with the help of my food processor and we had kebabs.  I think the flavor of these kebabs is fantastic.  You get the hint of spice from the cayenne, the warmth of the allspice and cinnamon, and plenty of fresh herb flavors from the parsley and cilantro.  Don't chop the pine nuts too finely because they provide some much needed texture.  The pita keeps the kebabs very moist, but can make them feel a little mushy.  You want to sear the outsides of the kebabs so they have some nice crust and texture to them for some contrast to the moist, soft interiors of the kebabs.

Recipes after the jump!

Quinoa Caprese

This seems to be the week where I keep going back to old favorites and re-posting recipes that I have already posted here in some form or another.  That's kind of sad considering I started this blog in December, but they wouldn't be old favorites if I didn't keep making them.  And, in my defense, I hadn't posted pictures of either of the two recipes that I re-posted this week because they had both been included in posts with multiple recipes.  So this time my Quinoa Caprese and my Cheddar Buttermilk Biscuits get posts of their very own, with pictures and everything.

This salad is one of my favorite light summertime lunches.  It would also be a fantastic picnic lunch or potluck dinner dish.  It is divine when tomatoes and basil are in season and you can grab pints of mini-heirloom tomatoes at the farmers market.  Yum.  I am getting all excited just thinking about tomatoes at the farmer's market.  But since these little cherry tomatoes from Fairway looked pretty delicious, even out of season, and since it was so wonderfully warm out today, I couldn't resist my craving for this salad.  I can't get enough of the way the sweet, but tangy tomatoes, pair with the creamy mozzarella cheese, fragrant basil and nutty quinoa.  And then there's that lemon vinaigrette to tie it all together.  I could wait until summertime to enjoy, but why deprive myself of something so healthy, yet tasty?

Recipe after the jump!