I first had quinoa (seriously if you don’t know much about quinoa checkout the Wiki article — the background info on it is very interesting) a couple years ago when my friend Justin (who has, unfortunately, since developed an allergy to it and cannot eat it anymore!!) introduced it back when we used to cook dinner then watch Desperate Housewives every Sunday. Since then, I haven’t been able to find it at QFC and every time I go to Whole Foods I forget to pick some up.
Then last week while looking for nutritional yeast (which I couldn’t find, unfortunately) I stumbled across Bob’s Red Mill quinoa. Despite costing $11, I picked up the bag and haven’t regretted it since.
Tonight I tried the Pineapple-Cashew-Quinoa Stir-Fry recipe from the Veganomicon.
The recipe is fairly simple — like any stir-fry, it just takes a while to prepare all of the ingredients. Under the ill-advisement of the cookbook, I didn’t prepare the quinoa a day early nor did I use fresh pineapple. Also, I opted for Thai basil and didn’t include mint leaves. In the end, this is basically a sweet-and-sour dish. And I’m not a huge fan of sweet-and-sour, but this was yummy enough. Next time I’m itching to use quinoa, however, I’ll probably do something else.
One thing I wanted to call-out for people who might have Veganomicon and want to make this: In the instructions, it starts off telling how to cook the cashews, but then it doesn’t tell you when to add them back. I totally forgot about them until the last six minutes or so of cooking, so that was unfortunate.
We had the dish with some store-bought pot-stickers.
So overall, if you are in the mood for quinoa and in the mood for stir-fry and in the mood for sweet-and-sour, this would be a great dish. Or, if you haven’t ever had quinoa and really like sweet-and-sour, this would be a great introduction.