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Most of my cookbooks are plastered open to the pages I use the most, and drizzled with some manner of cooking material. I have had some pretty wild-card results when, in the process of cooking a new recipe from an unblemished page that does not, consequently, hold its place, the wind blows, the pages turn, and I don’t actually notice that I am following another recipe than the one I started out with. One time hoisin-peanut sauce from the Lemongrass cookbook got blown away halfway through, morphing into ginger-lime sauce with hoisin sauce, to go on top of noodles. That one was awesome. Lately I have been having the virtual equivalent of getting blown away by the wind, which is losing my place and forgetting to bookmark the thing, and having to reconstruct by memory.
This week, I was trying to come up with a Thanksgiving salad, and found this great-sounding recipe in the New York Times, for Pomegranate Quinoa. I threw in the towel and went to Whole Foods, thinking they would be the only ones around to have such a rarified and fussy item as seeded-pomegranates seeds, but came home empty-handed, at too late an hour to sit down and seed the fruit myself. So, plan B turned up a nice quinoa-lime salad. But I couldn’t for the life of me find it when I went to make it later on in the wee hours of the morning. So, I tweaked the NYT recipe, using tangerines from the yard, and came up with this:
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
3/4 teaspoon coriander seeds
–roast in a pan, and grind in a spice grinder. add to …2 tablespoons +/- olive oil, juice of a lime or 2, and whisk it up
1/2 medium red onion, chopped
–chop the onion, and add it to a can of (drained) chick peas, and a handful of slivered almonds and pine nuts that have been toasted in the pan after the spices…
add all this to…
1 cup quinoa, cooked (4 cups cooked quinoa)
–I cooked it in chicken broth. You can do this in a rice cooker (adding a knuckle’s worth of broth over the quinoa, which you have rinsed like you would rice). Make sure the quinoa is drained (a lot of recipes tell you to parboil it, basically, but the extra liquid will drown the spices if you leave it in)
Fold in
3-4 tangerines, with seeds squeezed out
Drizzle the spice/lime dressing over the quinoa, but only a little at a time–it is super-absorbant.
Cover it and let it sit a bit and let the flavors get used to each other. Maybe it is my cast-iron stomach talking, but I found it was good left to sit in the sun for a couple hours, before being eaten. The warm olive-y lime taste, cut with the tangerines and texture of chick peas was kind of divine. I might even add a bit of mint next time, but this was easy to pull off with on-hand ingredients, and cheap and tasty too.
Quinoa image from NY Times. Tangerine image from www.botany.hawaii.edu/…/images/cit_ret_mid.jpg.
Posted by thesecretingredientiswater 
