Carrot Quinoa delight

Almost anyone who is on a special diet has heard of quinoa by now. Our journey with it was rather limited till about a year ago. I used to use it like I would use rava(cream of wheat). Never really experimented with it as a substitute for rice. Once we made that leap, we realized what we were missing! Good friends of ours eat their Rasam and Sambar with quinoa. This recipe came about one evening when I was pondering on what to cook within 20 minutes with quinoa. This is also my first recipe with pictures, yay!

Ingredients:

• 2 Cups of white Quinoa, cooked according to package directions
• Grated Carrots - 4
• Slivered almonds - 1/4 cup
• Jalapenos/Green Chillies - 2/3 pieces
• Crushed ginger - 1 tea spoon
• Grapeseed/Peanut oil - 2 tbsps
• Lemon juice - 3 tbsps
• Cilantro for garnishing.

Method:

• Heat the oil in a skillet and add the green chillies and crushed ginger to it.
• Add the carrots & sprinkle some water.
• Cook covered on medium heat till the carrots are tender.
• Add the slivered almonds and toss with salt to taste. Here's what it looks like when the carrots are cooked.

• Add the lemon juice and mix in the cooked quinoa in small parts.
• Garnish with chopped cilantro and enjoy.

Long hiatus, mixed lentils pongal

I haven't been posting for the last year and a half due to various complicated reasons I don't want to get into. Hopefully 2012 is the year of food blogging for me. I will be posting GFCF recipes as that's what we are all eating these days.

Today was Pongal, the south Indian spring/harvest festival. I got really homesick, mostly because the hubby was away playing racquetball, and I talked to my parents (my sister & BIL were visiting them). I so wanted to be there with them. Nostalgic memories of past Pongal days flashed through my head. My sister and I never cared so much about the actual significance of Pongal but we sure did enjoy the food. :) I decided to make venpongal, only to realize that we were out of Moong dal. I did have this mixed lentil soup mix from whole foods. It has red(masoor), whole green(toor), black(urad), yellow(moong) and white lentils. Voila, here comes mixed lentil pongal -

Ingredients:

Mixed lentils as described above - 1 cup

Rice 3/4 cup

Whole peppercorns - 2 tbsps

Cumin Seeds

Cashew cut into small pieces ~ 1/2 cup

Ghee - Clarified butter. (See my note at the end about this).

Curry leaves - 4-5

Method:

• Mix the lentils and rice and let them soak for half an hour. Pressure cook, waiting for at-least 5 whistles to ensure soft texture.
• Mash half the peppercorns into a coarse powder. I just used a sheet of paper and a heavy porcelain cup to do this since I don't have a mortar and pestle. (Note to self - buy one :)
• Heat the ghee and add the peppercorns, cumin seeds and cashews, fry until the cashews are light brown. Ghee can burn really quickly so watch out.
• Add the curry leaves after turning your stove off. The heat from the ghee is sufficient to roast the curry leaves.
• Add the cooked lentils and rice mix, salt to taste.

We ate this with this tomato gojju on the side. I omitted the onions from that recipe since we were out of those as well.

* I should warn readers that this pongal looks strange, its mostly a grayish-green color because of the black lentils and whole toor dal, but tastes yummy! Hopefully, I'll get better with adding pictures to my recipes this year.

** Ghee is made from butter but does not contain casein. The process of making ghee, turns it into 98% fat. See http://www.gfcfdiet.com/bakingcanning.htm for more info.