Stem Soup and Recipe-ish

Recently, I ended up with a lot of full leaf spinach (the way they’re harvested), green onions and cilantro from a grocery trip. It was my first time getting such spinach for myself, usually getting them in pre-packaged bags without long stems. Summer abundance meant the bundles I bought, along with the green onions and cilantro, were also excessive, so I had a lot of vegetable stems on my hands all of a sudden. Not being one to waste food, I thought about what I could do with all these stems, since they weren’t generally appealing to me if they would have been used like the rest of the stock. I didn’t like the crunchy nature of the stems, and the green onion stems were just a bit odd in flavour for my liking. I usually eat the green onion stalks a bit into the white where it starts to bulge into the bulbs, but this batch had a lot of white before it bulged and I was going to challenge myself to eat a good portion of it rather than waste it.

After some thinking, stem soup was what I came up with.

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Recipe for Pasta with Quinoa Instead of Ground Beef or Pork

I am in the middle of revolutionizing by adding quinoa (KIN-wa) as a major staple or base, in addition to rice, pasta and some bread. Knowing this, my friend Rami Bardeesy recently suggested a meal to me that exemplifies my life philosophy #3 – AND not or – to combine the best of both words, while being very healthy. It was pasta with tomato sauce, veggies and quinoa. That was the quick and easy to make meal, but I didn’t call it that in the post title because it’s the substitution of the meat I normally would have with this dish that is key.

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