recipe

Bacon Stir-Fry Quinoa with Mint, Anyone?

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Just wanted to share a bit of a crazy concoction I improvised on for supper tonight. Use however much or little you like in your version of the recipe.

stir fry quinoa bacon mint tomatoes onion green

  1. Cook quinoa in a rice cooker till ready, then turn off to let cool while you do the rest here.
  2. Dice up fresh grape tomatoes, green onions and mint leaves.
  3. Turn on wok to frying temperature (just above medium for me).
  4. Cut up bacon strips into half inch bits.
  5. Throw into wok and mix around till fried to desired level.
  6. Turn off stove.
  7. Throw in quinoa and mix well.
  8. Throw in all the diced up stuff and mix well.

It’s really good, but I caution against eating too much. Quinoa is potent stuff! You’ll have a lot of energy without having to eat a lot. But at least it’s not like sugar high sort of energy overload or anything like that. If you’re doing anything like marathon training or needing lots of energy in food that tastes and is good, this is for you!

Yes, bacon is good for you. Accept that and your world will be better. 🙂

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Stem Soup and Recipe-ish

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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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Healthy and Nutritious Quinoa and Rice Stir Fry Recipes

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Most people make stir fry with rice as a base. It’s great and it’s filling. However, I make mine with  quinoa (KIN-wa) for a whole load of extra protein to make stir fries that are healthy and nutritious. It hardly tastes any different from stir fry with general white steamed rice that I normally used before I learned about quinoa. The texture is finer because quinoa is finer than rice in texture, and that makes it easier to stir fry mixed in with the rice as well.

The recipes below are just generic recipes on which you could make quite a few variation substituting certain ingredients, and customize for your own preferences. Just by using different stir fry pastes alone, I could get Thai, Indian, Vietnamese, Singaporean, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indonesian and Malaysian stir fry from the Asian Home Gourmet series that has no artificial additives! I just then customize the rest of it as I like it to go with the flavour or whatever I want to have in my stir fry for that meal. You vary accordingly to your tastes.

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Recipe for Pasta with Quinoa Instead of Ground Beef or Pork

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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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