BF Cook-Along, Week One Round-up: Quinoa Recipes!

So in addition to my Asian-style Cold Quinoa salad, many of you submitted your own recipes for the inaugural week of the "BF Cook-along!" This is a round-up of the first week's recipes, all of which used quinoa. Some folks have not gotten back to me with full recipes so I just put what information they gave me. I'll add the recipes in as I get them! If you have any questions leave them in the comments!

Now we're in week TWO! And the cook-along ingredient is Eggplant! There are a few different ways you can submit a photo & recipe (and both must be present to make it into the week two round-up):

1. Post the picture of WHAT YOU MADE (not someone else's recipe...you do actually have to have cooked it at some point) on BF's Facebook Page along with the recipe (or the link to the recipe if you got it off the internet). Please include any modifications you made to the recipe!
2. You can also Tweet a photo and mention @BariatricFoodie but be sure to either include a shortened link to the recipe OR email the recipe to me at bariatricfoodie@yahoo.com.
3. You can simply email a recipe/pic to bariatricfoodie@yahoo.com.

Simple, right? 

Now onto the quinoa recipes! ("Um...what's quinoa?")

Deb’s Quinoa Tabbouleh

1 c. quinoa
2 c. water or vegetable broth
1 large or two medium tomatoes, chopped small
1 cucumber, chopped (optional)
4 scallions, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 tbsp chopped fresh mint
1/2 c. chopped fresh parsley
1/4 c. olive oil
1/4 c. lemon juice
1/2 tsp salt, or to taste


Preparation:


In a medium pot, cover quinoa in water or vegetable broth and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a slow simmer, cover, and allow to cook about 15 minutes, or until quinoa is cooked and most of the liquid has been absorbed. Allow to cool to room temperature. 
In a large bowl, combine tomatoes, cucumbers, scallions, garlic, fresh mint and fresh parsley. Add cooked quinoa, olive oil, lemon juice and salt, tossing gently to combine well. Season with salt, to taste.


Chill for at least one hour before serving, preferably overnight, to allow flavors to mingle.

Brandy’s Quinoa & Black Beans - FULL RECIPE FORTHCOMING!

Brandy used this recipe from Epicurious as her starting point, but here's what she had to say about how she made it hers!

"So this is basically quinoa, black beans, scallions, cilantro, tomatoes, lime juice and lime zest...salt & pepper, too. I can link the recipe if anyone is interested. The original recipe called for 1 tsp of sugar - I left it out and didn't miss it! I served this last night with Caribbean Pork Chops." 

Selby’s Quinoa & Millet Porridge - FULL RECIPE FORTHCOMING!

quinoa and millet cooked in almond and coconut milk with nutmeg and cinnamon . Bananas and strawberries . I used brown sugar for sweetness but you can use agave, or your favorite sugar substitute.

Shannon’s Smoked Quinoa Wraps --Makes 12 ¼ Cup wraps
1 c. Quinoa 
2 c. Chicken stock (could use any stock or water)
½ c. Onion finely chopped 
½ c. total of Red, Green, Orange, and Yellow Peppers or ½ cup of your choice pepper finely chopped
Green peppers will get bitter when cooked so do a combination of one other and green if you choose.
2 cloves Garlic crushed and finely chopped 
¾ c. roasted and chopped Walnuts 
1 Tbl Salt
½ Tbl Pepper
½ Tbl Cumin
½ Tbl Paprika 
4 Tbl Egg Beaters 

Measure and rinse quinoa set aside. In a sauce pan bring chicken stock to boiling and add quinoa. Reduce heat to simmer and cook for 20 minutes. Roast walnuts at 400 for about 3-4 minutes, watch closely. Chop and mix all veggies in a bowl, add cooked quinoa still hot to veggies. Mix well. Add chopped walnuts, garlic, and seasoning to bowl. Let cool. 
Soak corn husks in hot water for at least 15 minutes. 
When mixture is cool add eggs and mix well. Portion out ¼ cup onto flattened husks, and roll as you would a tamale. 

Prepare grill for indirect cooking. Coal fire, 2 piles of coal on either side of grill leaving the middle open, with a gas grill use side burners only not center. Bring grill to 275-300, add Wood chips to smoker drawer for gas grilling, or soak chips in water and add to charcoal. Place wraps between hot zones in the cool area of your grill (between the burners/coal). Leave on grill for about an hour and a half. Remove, allow to cool slightly, unwrap, and eat directly from the husk. 

Using the grill with a smoker allows for the egg and veggies to cook as well as imparting the smoke flavor to the mix. Truth be told, I could have skipped adding the egg, sautéed the veggies and added that to the quinoa and ate as is….adding a drop of liquid smoke (my husband is anti liquid smoke) to give it that flavor…but these would be delicious as a side with some shredded pork I think. I am not completely satisfied with this recipe as is, and will probably do some more playing around (thinking of adding cheese and maybe more egg to get it to stay together). But I am delighted with the flavor of this dish.

Barbara’s Quinoa Stuffed Peppers

I actually saw this recipe on Pinterest and just had to try it!! I did change a few things. I'm not a huge fan of ground turkey so I used ground pork. This time around I used a red, orange and yellow pepper just for the added color. The sweet from the peppers is great for cutting the spice a bit  I absolutely DISPISE cilantro, so I didn't use it either. OH, and I added in 1 cup of cooked Quinoa (YUMM-O!!!) Other than that everything was left the same. This is the picture of the ones I made today (3rd time making them because they are just that good!!!)

Original recipe can be found at: http://www.skinnytaste.com/2012/09/santa-fe-turkey-stuffed-peppers.html

BF Cook-along: Cold Asian-Style Quinoa Salad

Ok, first my apologies to my Foodies who only access the blog and not my Facebook or Twitter pages. Let me get you up to speed.

I decided to do a cook-long and it works like this. Folks give input on an ingredient they'd like to see everyone get challenged to use in a recipe over the course of the week. I pick an ingredient from those suggested (using a random generator) and we all make something with that ingredient, snap a photo and post it. The idea is...to get new ideas!

So for this inaugural week the ingredient was quinoa. If you've never heard of it, read this and we'll wait for you to come back.

All up to speed now? Lovely.

So tomorrow I'll announce next week's ingredient AND I'll post pictures (and recipes where I have them) of other Foodies' quinoa submissions. Look for it!

My recipe was in pursuit of an alternative to pasta or potato salad at the forthcoming Memorial Day barbecues. I love cold salads but I just can't do noodles. So here's what I came up with. The amount yields enough to pass at a function so if you're making it just for you OR you're not sure if others will like it, I highly suggest halving it.

Nik's Cold Asian-Style Quinoa Salad

Ingredients:

• 1 c. quinoa (if you have some cooked quinoa lying around, great! If not, there's guidance below)
• 2 c. water (if you have to cook your quinoa)
• 1 red bell pepper, seeded and chopped
• 1 orange bell pepper, seeded and chopped
• 1 small red onion, diced
• 2 c. cooked and shelled edamame (soy beans - I usually just got
•  a bag of frozen edamame and let it thaw!)
• 1 small can tiny shrimp (see picture below OR if you don't like shrimp a cup of diced cooked chicken meat works fine too)
• 1 small can Mandarin orange slices, drained of their liquids and rinsed
• 1/2 c. Light Asian Sesame or Sesame Ginger salad dressing
• 1/2 c. almond slivers

Directions:

If you need to cook your quinoa, the only thing I did differently from my general quinoa cooking directions is that I first dry toasted it, which really just means I put a dry pan (free of nonstick cooking spray or oil) on a medium flame and let it get hot, then added the dry quinoa and stirred until it started to brown. It just deepens the flavor a little bit. 

While the quinoa is cooking, dice up your peppers and onion and put them in a big bowl along with the edamame, cover and refrigerate. Once the quinoa is done refrigerate until cooled. DO NOT ADD HOT QUINOA TO YOUR VEGGIES!

When everything is nice and cool, combine quinoa with veggies, mandarin oranges and shrimp and mix thoroughly. 

Add the dressing and mix again. Cover it again and let it sit in the refrigerator for 2-3 hours.

When you are ready to serve this, heat a dry skillet over medium heat until hot and add the almond slivers. Toast them until they are fragrant and slightly brown.

Add toasted almonds to the cold salad mixture, toss and serve!

I like this salad! It's crunchy (both from the almonds and the edamame), a little salty and a little sweet. I think it could stand up against any other barbecue side dish!

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Happy Frapping!

Nik's Kitchen Sink Cabbage Stew

So…I had this head of cabbage. And it was about to go bad. And I could have made my regular “Comforting Cabbage & Sausage Stew.” But alas I didn't have all the ingredients. But you know what we say around these parts: "Play with your food!"

I didn’t change it up much but my goal was three-fold: 

• Get tomatoes in there in a way that La Grande Diva would not veto (per her eating rules tomatoes are only allowed in cases of salsa and tomato soup, which is ONLY to be eaten with grilled cheese sandwiches).
• Use up any random veggies I had in the fridge
• Make it spicy! (True fact: if you add the adjective "spicy" to any dish my children will at least try it)

So I made this nifty little variation. Mine has a kick to it. Yours doesn’t. I’ll give my recipe but you can really sub most of what’s in here. Except, of course, for the cabbage! I call it "kitchen sink" cabbage stew because you can put everything but the kitchen sink in it and it'd still be good!

Nik’s “Kitchen Sink” Cabbage Stew

Ingredients

• 1 large onion, diced
• 1 pkg. turkey smoked sausage, sliced into rounds of desired thickness
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1 head of cabbage, roughly chopped
• 1 small can low-sodium and/or low-sugar tomato soup
• 2 c. water
• ½ bag of baby spinach, rinsed
• ½ tsp. garlic salt
• ½ tsp. Herbs de Provence
• ½ tsp. cayenne pepper (omit if you don’t want it to be spicy!)
• 10 oz. cannellini beans, drained and rinsed.
• Optional (but I used): ½ can of sweet corn 

Directions:

Spray a pot with non-stick cooking spray and let it get hot over a high flame (like seriously…let it sit there a good 2-3 minutes). Once hot, drop the heat to medium.

Add onions to the pot and sautee until they are slightly softened (about 2 minutes). Add sausage and brown it. Finally, add garlic to the mixture and stirl.

Add cabbage, followed by soup and water. Allow the cabbage to cook down a bit before adding spinach, corn (if using) and desired spices.

Allow all this to cook over medium heat about 20 minutes, stirring often.

Add beans and stir through. Drop the heat to medium-low and simmer for about 15-20 minutes or until cabbage is tender.

The wonderful thing about this soup is that throwing the beans in there and letting them cook a while thickens the broth of the soup. So I guess technically it’s a “stoop” (this is the ONLY Rachel Ray term I’ve ever fully embraced).

The girls LOVED it. It was sweet and salty and savory all at the same time. To me it wasn’t overly spicy but your mileage may vary.

My eldest daughter (the picky one) described it like this: “It’s sort of like pork and beans except there’s vegetables instead of pork.”

Well…there ya go.

And just for fun. I usually take a gamillion pics of dishes at different angles and choose one final "money shot" (bad pun, I know!) for the blog picture. I thought I'd show you my outtakes for this dish. There weren't that many!

 I liked this picture but it didn't strike me as special in any way.

 Not that anybody notices this stuff but me  (cuz you all have lives!) but lately my final pics have been of two varieties: the direct overhead shot (as in the picture way up top) or with part of the plate or bowl off camera with some sort of background or side element. In this instance I thought the food was a bit dark in this pic (I was at my desk at work!) and the spoon and napkin just wasn't that interesting on top of my putty colored desk. 

I am by no means a pro food photographer but I'm working on learning to take better pictures! Lord knows if I ever do a food cookbook (having just finished the shake book that might be a minute!) I am here to tell you it'd need to be DIY all the way, so better to learn the skill of taking the pictures now, eh?

Nikki's Clicky Mousse

Hey! Remember me? I post food sometimes!

Foodies, indulge me a personal reflection moment. I am of the school of thought that self-care is very important and that there are aspects of your feelings and motivations that you should listen to and heed. So when you see that I haven't been posting for a while that usually means I've burned myself out. I live a pretty full life between being a single mom to the divas, my day job, this blog and the million and two things I sign up for. So every once in a while I just stop. And it's good for me because it allows me to be enthusiastic about the time when I go!

Anyway, back to the grind.

This is one of those recipes I THOUGHT I already had on the blog, came on to double check an ingredient and found that it was not!

You don't know how much I wanted to call this "Clicky pudding" (so I could sing about it to the tune of "We Wish You a Merry Christmas") but honestly the texture is of a mousse. Specifically, if you've ever had Jell-O Mousse Temptations. THAT texture. Lookit:

And here's my recipe!

Nikki's Clicky Mousse
(Makes approximately 6 servings)

Ingredients:

• 1 box sugar-free, fat-free chocolate pudding mix
• 2-3 scoops Click Espresso Protein, Mocha flavor (the more you put in, the more "mousse-y" it is). You can use regular Mocha or Mocha Decaf, doesn't matter.
• 1 tbsp. unsweetened cocoa powder (just makes for a deeper chocolate taste)
• 2 additional packets of no-calorie sweetener (balances out the bitter that is created by the extra cocoa + the espresso)
• 2 c. milk (I use skim)

Directions:

In a large mixing bowl, whisk together pudding mix, Click, cocoa powder and sweetener until well blended.

Add milk. Now, you can either whisk it (although this is going to get difficult after a point because the protein in the click "tightens" the mixture up a good bit) OR you can do what I do and go at it on medium speed with a hand mixer. Much smoother final product!

For fun you can add other things you like: Sugar-free syrups (hazelnut goes especially well in this one). As you can see I top mine with lowfat whipped cream. Usually I put a dusting of Fiber One crumbs (yes, I love the stuff that much!). Right now I am absolutely in love with eating desserts out of stemless wine glasses.

The protein in the Click increases the volume of the pudding, which is why I say it makes about 6 servings, but it really depends on your appetite. It could be more, could be less.

Either way it's yummy so enjoy!!!