Quinoa and corn medley – a successful disaster!

Today was my first attempt at cooking a recipe from The Vegan Table by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau. And I guess you can tell from the heading that it didn’t exactly go as planned…

The Quinoa and Corn Medley sounded like a fairly easy way to kick off my exploration of The Vegan Table. It’s from Chapter 4 – Let’s Celebrate: Menus for special occasions, and the gist of the recipe is:

• Cook quinoa in water or vegetable stock (I used half and half to keep some flavour but minimise the salt levels).
• Separately sauté, in water instead of oil, bell pepper (aka capsicum to me!), corn kernels, garlic, and scallions (which I would call spring onions).
• Mix everything together with parsley and lemon juice. (Plus salt, pepper and olive oil for drizzling, but I omitted these.)

I’d never actually sautéed in water before but didn’t expect it to be hard. Unfortunately, I managed to mess up by taking too long to chop the spring onions instead of keeping the mix moving in the pan, resulting in:

Oops!

Luckily, I was able to just dump everything that wasn’t caked on the base into another pan, add some more water, and continue, so it wasn’t irrecoverable. And after soaking for a while the original pan wasn’t even terribly hard to clean – perhaps because of the lack of oil?

The other hiccup with the recipe is that it called for the quinoa to be cooked without a lid, while I am used to covering it with a lid at the ‘reduce to a simmer’ stage. When cooking this recipe in future I will return to using a lid, because the quinoa took a lot longer than the recipe’s stated time to cook without it (and in the end I resorted to using a lid anyway to finish it off).

But… despite these issues, the final result was great! I steamed up some broccoli, which was one of the accompaniments mentioned in the serving suggestions, and the final dish – besides being super-healthy – was very nom-able! I’m looking forward to mastering that water-sautéing technique as we’ll definitely be putting this on the menu again soon.  And leaving my burnt pan aside, it’s certainly a big tick to start off with for The Vegan Table.

Healthy, tasty, and colourful!

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