On a typical week, I usually reserve some time on Sunday to peruse my usual recipe sources, make a dinner plan, and mindlessly make a grocery list for the ingredients I need. I'm guilty of flipping through my cooking magazines and just pulling the titles I think sound good, without even looking at the ingredients or the cooking instructions and this has gotten me into trouble several times! I will go start making dinner with the recipe I pulled and it says to marinate for an hour or takes a long time to prep and cook and often, I've had to abandon that dinner plan and just pull something quicker together at the last minute, thus throwing the whole plan off! However on my usual weekend recipe hunt a week ago, I pulled this recipe because I had been craving jambalaya and when the title said "quinoa" I instantly thought "quinoa=healthy" and it would be a good way to use up some turkey kielbasa and shrimp that I had on hand. So, in my usual fashion, I assembled the ingredients and when it came time to make this dinner one night, I finally read through the cooking instructions. This recipe is from Clean Eating magazine and is fairly simple, which is why I'm sharing it, however, I got the sneaky suspicion that this recipe was going to end up being a little blah on the spice factor. What is jambalaya without a little heat?! Here's what I did to perk up the recipe a bit...first, I sauteed some chopped onions in a little bit of olive oil, and then carried on with step 2, and then I added about 2 tsp of cumin to the shrimp-sausage mixture and 1 tsp of chili powder. And then to the quinoa, I added a few dashes of salt and a dash of cayenne pepper. Yeah, I added a touch of oil, which rendered the recipe slightly less "healthy", but the extra spices really helped kick this dish up a notch and Jon and I really enjoyed it! Sometimes recipes are really great bases and it just takes a few trial and error dinners to find what other spices and flavors will really enhance it. It's probably good cooking practice to read through recipes before you decide to make them, but it's also really rewarding to add your own spin to something and make it your own.
I got here from a blog created by Rebecca Sillitoe. I wanted to just leave a message but the system didn't respond properly. Hopefully this will work.
ReplyDeleteI hope you and Jon are doing OK in Nevada. I am keeping myself busy doing volunteer tax work, messing around with my computers, occasionally going on the air with my radio, and a bit of traveling.
Risa and I are in the preliminary stages of planning a trip to Seattle in the late July-early August time frame although that could change.
Nick