How time flies – another new year! Our Christmas dinner was postponed and Yvan accepted the challenge of cooking an entirely vegetarian meal – matched with beer too! Four tasty courses including a fancy dessert – I hope Yvan was quite pleased as I with it all.
One dish during this vegetarian feast was a quinoa side salad. Yvan adjusts things as he cooks and he sensed that he didn’t need so much plain-cooked quinoa in the end. As an experiment I tried mixing some with hot rice; it was pretty good! I find that the fluffy texture better than brown short grain rice, and as a more nutritious ‘grain’ it’s healthier than mixing in brown rice. Hopefully this combination would show up more frequently in the future – watch this space!
Quinoa Rice & Mabo Dofu
Top tier
Top tier contents: mabo dofu topped with chilli and red onion slices, red onion and green capsicum ‘salad’, rice mixed with quinoa topped with black sesame.
Bottom tier contents (not pictured): lumpia.
This mabo dofu was even more interesting this time around: I put in shiitake to bulk it up a little more. Using a korean miso that already had chilli and ‘sea snail’ added, it had a nice heat and a more ‘kelp like’ flavour that would of been normally achieved with fish sauce. For using beef mince instead of pork it was surprisingly lighter and rather moreish.
