Grain salad with roasted corn and poblano chiles

I bought poblano chiles for the first time on Saturday at the market and wasn't quite sure what to do with them. One look through the trusty Gourmet Cookbook and I found the perfect recipe. The original recipe was for a pasta salad, but I had some kamut (a type of wheat) in the pantry, so I decided to use that instead. I'm glad I did - this recipe is fantastic as a grain salad. I'm sure wheat berries, farro, barley, or brown rice would work beautifully as well. If you are like me and have several hippie whole grains in your pantry, now is the time to use them! This dish is packed with late summer produce - tomatoes, peppers, and corn. It's a bit of a pain to roast each vegetable separately, but it really doesn't take that long. I had fun roasting the chiles over an open flame on the stovetop - I was a tad nervous that they would catch on fire and fill the air with chile smoke, but I didn't have a problem. I also really enjoyed the dry-roasted onions - I've never cooked onions this way before. I was very very happy with how this dish turned out - it is sooo good! Healthy and colorful and just packed with flavor. Oh, and the leftovers make perfect lunches.

Whole grain blueberry buckle

My lab group recently went on a crazyawesome retreat to New Hampshire, and one of the things we did there was blueberry picking at Berry Knoll farm. The blueberries at the farm were some of the best I have ever tasted, and I came home with about a quart of them. I saved half to eat with yogurt and granola for my breakfasts this week, and started looking for a recipe to make with the other half. I decided to make something from Good to the Grain and ended up choosing the blueberry buckle. It's a nice thick cake with two layers of blueberries, and a crumb layer on top. The cake and crumbs are made with whole wheat pastry flour and spelt flour. The cake has great flavor and texture - Kim Boyce's recipes are awesome! We ate some of it for dessert tonight but it is really more of a breakfast cake...mmmm, I can't wait to eat some tomorrow morning =)

Veggie burgers

Veggie burgers are my meal of choice when I go out for pub food. Really, all I want is the fries so I don't usually miss the beef too much. Although I've eaten many variations of veggie burgers at restaurants, I don't have much experience making them myself, so I was excited to see this recipe in this month's issue of Food & Wine. The recipe is by Richard Blais of Top Chef fame, and the list of ingredients is insanely healthy. I understand that this might not be as much of a selling point for you as it is for me, so I will also tell you that these veggie burgers actually taste really good. The texture is a bit too smooth for them to really be burger-like (this is probably my fault, because I used bulgur wheat instead of Isreali couscous), but they hold together well and the flavor is great. And, they're vegan!

The ingredient list is a bit daunting, since several of the components have to be pre-cooked, but the patties freeze well so one batch will probably last you a while. I've been eating these just with ketchup, but I think some quick-pickled veggies would add nice acidity and crunch. The original recipe suggests serving the burgers with greens tossed in lemon juice, and pomegranate ketchup (1/2 cup ketchup + 1 tbs pomegranate molasses), which also sounds good.

I've got a couple other veggie burger recipes that I'm thinking of trying, so hopefully I'll have a little veggie burger series up on the site soon!

Barley risotto with eggplant, summer squash, and tomatoes

I've been finding all kinds of good eggplant recipes lately. This one is from Cooking Light, September 2009 and is my Magazine Mondays entry for this week. I made this recipe for the first time soon after that issue came out, but I made the mistake of using whole grain hulled barley, which is fine if you're just simmering it in a pot of water, but not so good for something like risotto, which requires lots of attention and stirring. It took forever to cook - we actually ended up losing patience and eating it while the barley was still a bit raw...not so good.

I remembered the recipe recently, and decided to give it another try. This time I followed the instructions, and used pearled barley. I made a couple substitutions to the other ingredients though - I didn't have enough pine nuts around, so I used a mixture of pine nuts and sliced almonds. I also substituted summer squash for half the eggplant (needed to get through the excess of squash in the fridge), and was quite happy with the result. This dish came out really good - full of summer vegetables, with a great mixture of fragrant basil, crunchy nuts, and creamy cheese on top.

Quinoa and lentil salad

This salad came together in an effort to use up some red quinoa* and lentils that had been in the pantry for a while, as well as some green beans and corn that were still in the fridge at the end of the week. Andrew made the dressing, which was inspired by Mexican flavors. This is definitely a nutritionally balanced meal in itself, and the leftovers make great lunches.

Unfortunately, since we created this dish ourselves, I can't write out a detailed recipe - neither of us is in the habit of measuring ingredients as we cook. So this will be a general description of the dish, with only very approximate amounts listed for the ingredients - sorry about that. I'll try to do this better in the future!

*Quinoa is a grain-like seed that offers more protein than most other grains. Great for vegetarians who struggle with getting enough protein in their diets.


Quinoa and lentil salad
All amounts listed here are very approximate. Because the quinoa and lentils expand quite a bit when cooked, we got dinner and several lunch portions out of this.

For salad:
1.5 cups quinoa (I used red because that's what I had on hand, but the regular ivory one would be fine)
1 cup lentils
Green beans, trimmed and cut into 1 1/2 inch segments
3 ears of corn, husks removed (frozen would also be fine)
1 small onion, chopped
Cilantro, chopped

For dressing:
Lemon juice (lime would probably be better, but we didn't have any)
2 cloves garlic, minced
Lime zest
Hot smoked paprika
Cumin
Salt
Extra virgin olive oil

Neither of us can really estimate the amounts of the dressing ingredients. I'd say about a 1:1 ratio of oil to lemon/lime juice is a good start. Spices and salt can be done to your taste - we went pretty heavy with the paprika, so that was the dominant flavor. You want enough dressing to lightly coat, not soak, the salad.

Fill two pots (3 quart size or so) with water and bring to a boil. Place quinoa in a fine-mesh strainer and run water through it until water runs clear. When water is boiling, add quinoa to one pot and cook uncovered until quinoa is tender. The germ (white curled sproutlike thing) will come out of most of the seeds when they are close to done. When quinoa is finished, drain well and allow the grains to sit in strainer for 5 minutes before spreading onto a plate to cool. In the other pot, boil lentils until tender. Drain and cool.

While quinoa and lentils are cooking, bring another large pot of water (sorry about the many pots involved here) to a boil. Add ears of corn and boil for 5 minutes. Remove corn (don't drain water), and run under cold water until cool enough to handle. While corn is cooling, add beans to boiling water in the same pot used to cook corn, cook for 5 minutes or until crisp-tender, drain and run under cold water to stop the cooking. Cut kernels off of corn.

In a large bowl, mix together quinoa, lentils, corn, green beans and onions. Whisk dressing ingredients together until well mixed and then toss with salad. Top with cilantro and salt to taste.