Simple vegetarian meals are always excellent options for weekday after work cooking. This dish is a great addition since it only takes about 20 minutes to make with most of the time spent just waiting for the quinoa to cook.
If you want to save additional time and make this dish in about 10 minutes or less, pre cook your quinoa the night before and add it to the pan to reheat with the vegetables.
Full Recipe: Broccoli, Spinach, Quinoa Skillet.
I tend to think of squash in October when front porches are getting filled with pumpkins and gourds and comfort food permeates the desire to stay warm as the weather cools down from the summer heat. While that may be the case through the years, I’m starting to change the behavior each time I enjoy squash outside of the Fall season. Why relegate this flavorful food to only one season? Just because it is most associated with comfort food. Isn’t comfort food something relevant all year?
In my challenge to this behavior, I was presented some beautiful acorn squash at the Studio City Farmers’ Market. I picked one from the box of freshly picked squash and paid my $2.
Roasting squash gives it such a beautiful color and really makes the ‘meat’ inside come to life. For this recipe, I simply brushed some olive oil and cracked some pepper and salt over each half after cleaning out the seeds. You can follow what I did here with quinoa stuffing or you can mix it up. Feel free to use couscous or farro instead of quinoa. Also any diced dried fruit works too. Cranberries, apricots, go ahead and experiment for your own creation. Or you can just do what I did if you want to guarantee success.
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Place acorn squash halves on foil and drizzle olive oil and salt and pepper the inside of the squash. Face the inside up on the baking sheet. Cook for 20 minutes. Turn the squash over and cook for 10 minutes longer then remove and keep warm.
Cook your quinoa according the package directions. You’ll need only a 1/2 cup of dried quinoa. Once cooked set aside and keep warm.
The past two weekends I bought some fresh fava beans. They’re hard to miss. Giant peapods with a rich green color usually next to a box of beans, fava beans are sure to catch your attention. The next thing to wonder is what to make with these colorful bean monstrosities. For me, there was an obvious answer – fava bean spread.
Last year, we were dining out and enjoyed some fava bean spread on toast at a local restaurant. I immediately came home and started to search the Internet for some recipes to try my own take on this wonderful, buttery bean spread. Some recipes called for mixing in some goat cheese or Crème fraîche. I wanted to try something without the addition and then build from there.
The recipe below is just that. A basic fava bean spread that you can use as a base to experiment. Maybe add a 1/3 cup of goat cheese to it. Perhaps some tablespoons of Crème fraîche until you get the texture and flavor you want. You could also add grated cheese.
For now, this basic recipe will get you started and really it needs nothing. The flavor is great as is, but if you do experiment please leave me some comments on what you did to enhance or try. I would love to hear it.
Cook the whole fava beans in boiling water for 5 minutes. Remove and let them cool for 5 minutes. Start chucking the pods by removing the pod. Put beans aside in a separate bowl. When all finished removing the pods, now remove the skin from each bean. You’ll see a dingy green skin that you can peal off to reveal bright green peas. Place the bright green beans in a saute pan.
Heat the saute pan on medium heat and toss the beans with 1 tablespoon of the olive oil. Add water to the pan. Toss to coat everything and heat mixing the beans around for about 5 minutes to soften the beans.
Add the cooked beans, lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper to a food processor. Puree it until you have a thick paste. Add more olive oil or lemon juice if you need to get it smoother or modify the flavor a bit.
Heat some bread slices brushing olive oil on top of each and place in the oven at 350 degrees for 5 minutes. Remove the bread when done and spread on the paste. Shave some parmesan and drizzle a little olive oil to finish.
Casseroles are a great way to make being a vegetarian more flavorful and interesting. Granted, I’m not a vegetarian. However, we try to eat vegetarian or vegan for most of our dinners at home, doing about four or five a week without any meat. What I like about casseroles is that they create flavor meals that feel more like meals and less like a side dish. Plus baking something is usually easy and since there is no meat in the dish, the cooking time is pretty fast too.
A few weeks ago I made a recipe I found that uses rice and a kale black bean soup from Pacific Foods. My post isn’t sponsored like the blogger who did the recipe for the brand’s website, but that’s fine. I really didn’t mind spending $3 for the soup and trying it out. The recipe seemed foolproof and the cost to make this dish is pretty low, if you care about that.
What I enjoyed about this dish is the crunchiness rice gets when you bake it. Baked rice dishes enhance the texture of the rice and the soup added to the recipe gives the rice even more flavor.
If you are looking for an easy, after work vegetarian meal you should give this one a try. I’m sure I’ll make it again soon.
Growing up with an Italian mother, well 3/4 Italian and 1/4 French, made for some pretty amazing meals that a young boy never could truly appreciate. However, there was one dish my mom was famous for: Lasagna. It was a staple of the holidays at our home. She definitely took a lot of pride making it for family and guests and people lavished their praise.
As I grew older and as my own taste matured too, I came to appreciate what a great lasagna takes to perfect. Many restaurants and home cooks try to make this classic dish and fail. There is too much sauce, they use sub-par ingredients or there are too many extras spinach, mushrooms and meats that it all becomes too complex and loses the perfection of a simple lasagna.
Mine is different than my mother’s, not because I think less of her’s; rather, I wanted to do my own take on this dish. For me it is all about using the best ingredients. Since moving to Los Angeles, that hasn’t been too easy with some failures in finding the key ingredient – fresh ricotta cheese. Fortunately, I finally found a rich and creamy ricotta that is sold by Laurent Bonjour’s Cheese Corner found Saturdays at the La Canada Farmers’ Market.
I also make a homemade pasta sauce that I lightly blend with a hand mixer. You can use two jars of your favorite pasta sauce. I recommend Mario Batali’s marinara if you do not have time to make your own.
The sauce, ricotta, and a quality Parmigiano-Reggiano have the most impact in my opinion. I haven’t found much difference when it comes to the pasta noodle or even with the mozzarella you choose.
Preheat oven at 35o degrees.
Cook the noodles for about 6 minutes in boiling water. Do not overcook. You want the noodles to be soft but still firm. Drain and set aside.
In a bowl, combine the ricotta cheese, 1/4 cup Parmesan, parsley and the oregano.
Spread a layer of sauce on the bottom of a 9 x 13 lasagna pan. Add a layer of noodles. Spread ricotta cheese mixture over noodles. Sprinkle some crumbled cooked sausage (or chopped spinach) over ricotta cheese mixture. Add a thin layer of pasta sauce and sprinkle with mozzarella. Repeat this process two more times. Finally add one last layer of noodles and then add a layer of pasta sauce and mozzarella cheese. Sprinkle top with the remaining 1/4 cup of Parmigiano-Reggiano.
Cover the lasagna with foil and cook in the oven for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, remove foil and cook uncovered for 15 minutes more. Finally remove from oven and let it rest for 10 minutes. Cut and serve.
Lentils are a personal favorite in my vegan and vegetarian cooking. I tend to save a lot of recipes that use them on my Pinterest Mostly Vegetarian board (you can follow me on Pinterest here.) A recent save is this lentil and spinach dish I made last week. It’s pretty easy to prepare and can be done after work, since it only takes about 30 minutes or less to prepare.
I’d recommend serving it with some bread or a simple salad. It comes out more soup like depending on how much you cook down the liquid. I kept quite a bit of the liquid.
The end result is fantastic and made for a very flavorful dish we are sure to have many more times to come.