This delicious side dish has a few components to it, but they’re all easy.
Whew that was so hard… not!
P.S. Make extra vinaigrette and use it on salads or sandwiches.
Here’s another recipe from Cooking Light magazine, which I adapted to make even healthier. The original recipe used pork but I made it vegetarian by using chickpeas instead. I also swapped out the regular dairy milk and used light coconut milk, and swapped the white flour to millet flour, although it would probably be just fine without any flour at all. I added garam masala and increased the amount of curry powder because the original was bland. I think the result is a really nice vegan meal. Having pre-cooked rice and chickpeas on hand makes it a super-fast weeknight meal. Continue reading “Curried Chickpeas with Rice”
This meat-free dinner is adapted from a recipe my husband found on his favorite cycling podcast website. So you know it’s got to be good if it was developed with athletes in mind, right? Well, we made this and dug into it and thought we went to heaven. The spicy smoky flavor of the black beans combined with the creamy sweet potato is a marriage of flavors that’s meant to be. I’m not kidding, try it and if you don’t see angels I will eat my cycling socks. Continue reading “Black Bean and Salsa Stuffed Sweet Potatoes”
“Bowls” are a newly popular concept, and for good reason. They are fresh, generally quick to put together, tasty, and relatively inexpensive.
Think Chipotle, SweetGreen, or pretty much any of the “healthy fast food” franchises popping up in malls across the country. Essentially it’s a pile of stuff in a bowl, with lettuce/greens on the bottom, and stuff on the top. Hm… sounds kind of familiar, right? Like a salad bar? Yep, exactly like a salad bar. The difference is in the marketing, and the proportions. it’s a little bit of salad with a lot of “stuff” arranged in a colorfully pretty selection of “wedges” around the edge.
Literally, it’s just a bowl of different wholesome, nicely flavored ingredients, that you then pour some sauce on and mix together, like… well… like a salad. Yeah.
I got this rice with salmon (arroz con salmon) recipe from a food blog written by a Columbian woman. I’m so sorry I’ve lost track of the url of that web site but I made a lot of changes to the recipe anyway, so it barely resembles the original.
I removed several ingredients, changed several others, and used leftovers to compile the dish instead of creating it from scratch. It was surprisingly good! I served it with sautéed beet greens but I recommend choosing a side veggie that’s more neutral in flavor, like broccoli or green beans. The beet greens were good but the strong flavor overpowered the more subtle taste of the rice dish. Continue reading “Creamy Rice with Salmon”
Ever make more rice than you can eat? If you aren’t going to use it in the next few days, you can freeze it for later use. Here’s how:
To thaw, simply massage the bag briefly to break up the frozen rice, then empty it into a microwave safe bowl, cover with a paper towel, and microwave for 30 seconds or so (depending on the wattage of your microwave).
This works for most other cooked whole grains as well. I used to buy frozen pre-cooked brown rice at Trader Joe’s, but this is more economical and tastes fresher.
