Quinoa Salad with Potato and Navy Beans

Following up on last week’s cupcakes, I wanted to work again with quinoa.  However, this time I was interested in cooking a stovetop whole-grain meal, as opposed to baking with quinoa flour.

Starting Point: Giada de Laurentiis’ Quinoa and Purple Potato Salad

The original recipe seems to be designed as a visually appealing Peruvian-Italian fusion side dish.  Not only did I want to shift away from the Old World ingredients, but I wanted something much more utilitarian: a hearty grain-potato-legume salad that I could have as a main dish every day for the next week.

Instead of gardens peas, my variation on this salad used small navy beans.  I used dry, bagged beans, not canned.  I first applied the so-called “quick-soak” on them: boiling 2 cups of beans in water for five minutes, removing the pot from heat, and then letting the beans sit in the warm water for an hour.  I then drained the soaked beans, transferred them back into fresh water, and cooked them at a simmer for an additional two hours.

Purple potatoes are attractive and all, but large red potatoes worked just fine for my purposes. I prepared two large potatoes as directed: unpeeled, cut into cubes, boiled for 15 minutes, and drained.

I moved on to the dressing next.  Instead of black olives, I used Bella Sun Luci sun-dried tomato halves, going for the soft, bagged variety, rather than the kind packed in jars with oil.  I used sunflower oil instead of olive oil, and pure cranberry juice (not a blend or cocktail) instead of lime juice.  I left out the oregano and swapped 1/8 teaspoon of cayenne pepper for the 1/4 teaspoon black pepper.  All of these I combined with light agave nectar and salt in my 3-cup food processor.  I then refrigerated the resulting dressing while I prepared the quinoa.

For the quinoa, I added 2 cups of Bob’s Red Mill Organic Whole Grain Quinoa to 4 cups of Swanson organic vegetable broth (stretched with a little water).   Instead of garlic, I used the bulbs from about four green onions, which are a good substitute for the flavor of wild leeks, or ramps.  After bringing the quinoa, broth, and onions to a boil, I let the mixture simmer for 20 minutes, giving it a thorough stir every few minutes.  There was no need to remove the onions once the quinoa was cooked.  After letting the quinoa rest for a few minutes off of the heat, I combined it with the beans and potatoes in a large bowl.  I then added the dressing and tossed.

The result is perhaps I little heavier on the quinoa than I was initially anticipating, much more of a grain dish than what one typically thinks of as a salad.  Swapping beans for peas makes it even heartier.  Ultimately, I think of it as a South American version of succotash.  Accordingly, next time I might try a more vegetable-like bean, such as lima beans.

This dish can be eaten cold like any potato salad, but I prefer it hot.  I’ve been eating it with a little leftover wild rice, just to add yet another whole grain to the mix.

Quinoa Chocolate-Banana Cupcakes

If you're going to bake from American origin and not make the same handful of recipes all the time, you're going to have to look beyond cornmeal.  Quinoa (keen-wah) is one of the staple grains of the Western Hemisphere, and it's starting to appear more frequently in standard supermarkets, both as a whole grain and as a flour.

Quinoa is the seed of the annual flowering forb Chenopodium quinoa, a member of the amaranth family, Amaranthaceae.  This family includes not only amaranth itself, but also tumbleweeds and several species cultivated as ornamental plants.  The plant is not a true grass, so the grain is therefore regarded as a pseudocereal.  In its natural state, the grain is coated in a bitter chemical called saponin, which is toxic to humans.  The grain must therefore be carefully washed before preparation. (Packaged whole grain quinoa is almost always pre-washed.)   C. quinoa has been utilized as a food source in South America for thousands of years, with cultivation dating to around 1500 BCE in the Lake Titicaca Basin of Bolivia and Peru.

Quinoa makes a good South American stand-in for a related North American species, C. berlandieri, also known as pitseed goosefoot.  C. berlandieri is one of the only grains known to have been domesticated in the present-day United States, with evidence of cultivation appearing around the same time as its southern cousin.  Pitseed goosefoot has effectively vanished as a cultivated grain in the U.S., although it is still grown in Mexico, primarily as a leaf vegetable under the name huauzontle or red Aztec spinach.

Starting Point: Bob's Red Mill Sour Cream Fudge Cupcakes

For starters, I used peanut oil instead of butter, heating it with a little water and then whisking in the cocoa (Hershey's works fine).  My quinoa flour is Bob's Red Mill Organic Quinoa Flour.  I sifted the flour with the baking power, baking soda, and salt.  Instead of sifting this mixture with sugar, I added 1/2 cup of maple syrup and 1/2 cup of light agave nectar after sifting, and then blended it all together with the cocoa mixture.

I wasn't using eggs, which simplified the final steps in the batter preparation.  After blending in the cocoa mixture, I added two pureed bananas.  The banana is, of course, originally Asian, but the flavor and consistency mimics the North American fruit known as the pawpaw (Asimina triloba).  Pawpaw can be gathered locally in the St. Louis area, but the fruit isn't mature until late summer or early autumn.  I then added vanilla and, instead of sour cream, 1/4 cup of unsweetened coconut milk and 1 teaspoon of white vinegar.

These cupcakes needed about 22 to 23 minutes in my oven, instead of the recommended 20 minutes.  Far from being dry, they turned out extra-moist, almost like a boxed "pudding cake".  Very decadent.  The nutty taste of the quinoa combines well with the cocoa and banana flavors.

These go really well with a peanut butter frosting. To prepare that one either needs to cheat a little and use regular confectioner's sugar (as I did) or hunt down some maple sugar.

It's likely that pitseed goosefoot would have been harvested in the fall in North America, so quinoa-based baked goods such as these cupcakes make an excellent autumn treat.

Faux-Asian Wild Rice and Vegetable Stew

Our household was in need of some hot comfort food last night, and a wild rice stew seemed like a good choice.

There are three species of American wild rice, but only Zizania aquatica and Zizania palustris are cultivated.  Z. texana is an endangered Texas species.  All of these are annual flowering aquatic grasses in the family of true grasses, Poaceae.  Just as with the more familiar Asian rice (Oryza sativa), the wild rice grain is the edible seed of the plant.  Wild rice is the only cultivated grain native to the continental United States, and, as a true grass, it is the New World’s only cultivated cereal other than corn. (Amaranth, cassava, and quinoa being non-grass grains, or pseudocereals.)

Cultivation of wild rice is a twentieth-century phenomenon, prompted by revived interest in the grain as a food source.  However, the grain was and still is gathered from Zizania plants by native Americans in the Great Lakes region, using two-person canoe teams gathering along freshwater shorelines and stream banks.

Starting Point: Guy Fieri’s Creamy Wild Rice

Wild rice often appears as a component in bagged or boxed rice blends, but most supermarkets now also carry a brand of pure wild rice.  I found Reese products at my local Dierbergs and picked up two 2.75 oz. boxes of their Quick Cooking Minnesota Rice, as I was motivated by a need for a short boiling time.  (Uncooked rice takes about 30 to 45 minutes to boil.)

The two boxes yielded around 4 cups of cooked rice, which was just about right for a double batch of the original recipe.  Red bell peppers and crimini mushrooms are native to the Americas, but the other vegetables required a little substitution.  The ramp or wild leek (Allium tricoccum) is a native substitute for the conventional bulb onion, but it’s rare to find it in produce aisles.  I used green onions, which approximate the ramp’s flavor.  (In future batches, I’m considering using a little garlic as well.)

I used jicama for both the carrots and celery.  Also known as the “Mexican potato,” this is the tuber from the yam bean plant (Pachyrhizus erosus).  Jicama seems to be enjoying some popularity right now as a component in Mexican American cooking, as it can be found in some mainstream supermarkets.  (I found mine at Dierbergs.)  Jicama is a bit tougher to peel than your typical potato, owing to the roughness of the skin and the size of the root.  Per Jack Bishop’s recommendation, I also took off the very outer layer of flesh, which tends to be fibrous.  The flesh underneath is reminiscent of a potato, but more watery and less starchy, with a little bit of a carrot-like odor.

I wanted to prepare this stew as a hearty main dish rather than a side, so I went heavier on the vegetables than the original recipe, using about 50% more than called for in a double batch (e.g., 3 tablespoons of bell pepper instead of 2).  I sautéed the veggies in sunflower oil and added salt and cayenne pepper, skipping the black pepper.

Heavy cream presents a challenge when cooking from American origin.  The best substitution in vegan cooking is unsweetened coconut milk.  Coconuts are natural globe-trotters even without direct dispersal by humankind, but it’s debatable whether the plant was distributed in the Americas prior to European contact.  Regardless, there aren’t many good substitutes for the richness of cream.  On the positive side, I surmised that the combination of rice, vegetables, cayenne pepper, and coconut milk would lend the dish a pleasant Asian quality.   So Delicious Unsweetened Coconut Milk was my choice.

After adding the milk and cooked rice, I cooked everything for an additional 8 minutes or so, skipped the mustard and parsley, and served.  The result was in fact something closer to an Asian soup or stew than a creamy side dish, with a thick mound of rice and vegetables in a “broth” of coconut milk, oil, and hot spice.  Very good, and very filling.

Wild rice is typically harvested in September in the Great Lakes region, so this dish is appropriate for seasonal eating in autumn.

Update 4/23/11: I made a second batch of this dish last weekend. I used standard dry wild rice instead of quick rice, cooking it for about an hour.  I also used a bit more rice, so it soaked up the coconut milk better.  It made the resulting dish a little less soup-like and more like a grain-and-vegetable entree or side.  I also cheated a little on the origin for the second batch, adding black pepper and two tablespoons of spicy brown mustard for variety.  It turned out really well and fed me for the rest of the week.

Quick Blueberry "Jam"

In all honesty, the corn muffins in yesterday’s post are really just a delivery device for this blueberry jam.  Something about blueberry’s mellow sweetness seemed a good fit for baked goods made from cornmeal.

The northern highbush blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum) is the most widely grown commercial blueberry native to North America.  V. corymbosum is a perennial flowering shrub of the heather family, Ericaceae.  In botanical terms, the fruit itself is a true berry: a simple, pulpy fruit with seeds and an edible pericarp, grown from a single ovary.  Domesticated V. corymbosum is a relative newcomer, have been first cultivated in the early twentieth century by the collaborative efforts of a USDA botanist, Frederick Coville, and a family cranberry farmer, Elizabeth White.  However, the conspicuous, edible fruit was well-known to native American gatherers throughout the present-day eastern United States, where V. corymbosum grows naturally.

I don’t have any experience with canning, so I was looking for a recipe that would allow me to quickly make a small quantity of refrigerated blueberry jam, or at least a sweet sauce that could pass for jam.  Jill McKeever’s Fresh Blueberry Spread fit the bill.

I started with two 6 oz. packages of Driscoll’s blueberries, which yielded just shy of three cups of fruit.  Even after washing the fruit, I had to carefully inspect them for stray stems, leaves, and flower parts.  It was a bit laborious, but thankfully I was working with a relatively small quantity of fruit.  I added about 3/4 cup of water, gently boiled for five minutes, and then let the juice strain off naturally through a thin towel for about an hour.  If, unlike me, you are a canner, the juice can be used to make blueberry syrup.

I then transferred the boiled, drained fruit back into the saucepan with about 1/4 cup of SpringTree Grade A Maple Syrup and 2 tablespoons of water.  I boiled for ten minutes, then added two teaspoons of R.W. Knudsun Just Cranberry Juice.  There are no true citrus trees native to the Americas, but cranberry juice has a comparable acidity.  I then let the mixture cool for a few minutes, stirred it well and transferred it to a couple of jelly jars.  This isn’t true canning, so the jars don’t have to be sterilized, but this means that the jam must be eaten within a few weeks.

The resulting spread is more akin to cooked blueberries in sweet sauce than a true jam, as it doesn’t have jam’s viscosity or stickiness.  However, it seems like an especially good fit for pancakes and waffles, or in this case, for spooning on warm muffins.  Northern highbush blueberries are picked during the middle of the growing season, so if you’re eating seasonally this is a good summer spread.

Sweet American Corn Muffins

Like baked acorn squash, cornbread is one of the foodstuffs that is tied to my paternal grandmother’s kitchen table in my memories.  Unlike squash, however, I was sort of ambivalent towards cornbread as a child.  Oh, I would always eat it if was placed it in front of me, but there was something about the dense, crumbly quality of cornbread that never really sat well with my picky childhood palate.  Wasn’t bread supposed to be smooth and light, like a slice of Roman Meal Whole Wheat?  Of course, I’ve since come around to cornbread’s virtues, particularly when it’s of the thicker, firmer variety that doesn’t fall apart when you bite into it.

A kernel of corn, or maize, is the fruit and seed of the annual flowering grass Zea mays.  The plant is a member of the true grass family Poacaeae, which means that maize kernels are by definition a cereal.  An ear of maize is kind of a strange beast, from a botanical anatomy point of view.  Each ear consists of the fruit from a cluster of a few hundred female flowers (what botanists term an inflorescence).  However, the maize kernels never fuse together into a single mass, as they do in figs, mulberries, pineapples, and other edible fruits that develop from flower clusters.  This is fortunate for us humans, since the discreteness of the tiny maize kernel is one of the features that makes the grain so useful as a staple crop.

Maize is, of course, probably the single most important food crop to be cultivated in the Americas.  There is disagreement about the origin of Z. mays, which genetic analysis has enlightened but not resolved.  The plant may be the result of a direct domestication of a single wild Zea species, or a hybridization of multiple Zea species, or a hybridization with a related genus.  Regardless, archaeological evidence suggests that Z. mays cultivation began around 9,000 years ago (7,000 BCE) in the Balsas River valley of southeastern Mexico.  Maize cultivation seems to have taken off in the second millennium BCE, when the grain began to spread rapidly throughout the Americas and the ears started to attain something closer to their current proportions.  By the second millennium, A.D., maize was the staple crop of the Mississippian culture embodied at nearby Cahokia, some 1,500 miles or so from the plant’s point of origin.  While maize’s need for a relatively warm climate precluded its cultivation in the far north or south of the Western hemisphere, it’s fair to say that corn had conquered the Americas by the time of European contact.

I recently had a particular craving for cornbread muffins with blueberry jam, which seemed like a nice complement for a sweeter, smoother sort of muffin.  Accordingly, I shied away from recipes that used whole corn, cheese, or spices.   Patrick and Gina Neely’s Honey Cornbread Muffins seemed like a good starting point.

For flours and meals, my choice is usually Bob's Red Mill, an employee-owned brand that you can now find fairly consistently in supermarkets.  For the cornmeal, which provides the distinctly coarse texture of cornbread, I went with their Stone Ground Medium Cornmeal.

When cooking from an American origin, wheat is out, which means that you're essentially doing gluten-free baking.  Subtract rice, barley, sorghum, oats, rye, and so on, and New World baking can be a real challenge.  For the all-purpose flour, I substituted 3/4 cup of corn flour, 2 tablespoons of tapioca flour, and 2 tablespoons of quinoa flour.  Using tapioca is cheating a bit, since the cassava from which it is made is native to South America and the Caribbean.  However, tapioca contributes to the thickening the batter would normally get from eggs, adds a distinctive sweet sort of flavor, and helps with the texture of the finished product.  Quinoa constitutes a bit of a cheat too, since it is from the Andes Mountains.  However, a closely related species, pitseed goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandieri), was evidently domesticated in the present-day eastern United States before falling out of favor with the arrival of corn and beans.  The quinoa available in supermarkets today is about as close as we're going to get to that heirloom grain.  Quinoa flour is sort of sharp-smelling, but in baking it provides a really flavorful nutty quality.  I mainly threw it in for a little variety. (Gluten-free baking seems to thrive on flour blends.)

I swapped water for milk, and added a tablespoon of corn oil to compensate for the loss of milk fat.  Instead of eggs, I used 4 tablespoons of corn starch and a bit more water.  In most instances, one would use equal parts corn starch and water to substitute for eggs, but I went a little light on water to compensate for the for fact that I used maple syrup instead of sugar and honey.  Instead of using more oil in place of the butter, I went with sunflower butter, which added a bit of a "peanut butter-ish" flavor to the mix.

My final, modified ingredient list goes:

• 1 cup Bob's Red Mill Medium Cornmeal
• 1/2 cup Bob's Red Mill Corn Flour
• 1/4 cup Bob's Red Mill Tapioca Flour
• 1/4 cup Bob's Red Mill Quinoa Flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons SpringTree Grade A Maple Syrup
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 cup + 1 tablespoon water
• 1 tablespoon Mazola Corn Oil
• 4 tablespoons Argo Corn Starch
• 1/4 cup + 2 tablespoons Sunbutter Organic Sunflower Seed Spread

The result was pretty good, way better than I was anticipating for a first try.  The muffins rose nicely for a recipe with no wheat flour; I was afraid I'd end up with little hockey pucks.  The combination of the expected classic cornbread sweetness with the maple, sunflower, and quinoa flavors is really appealing.  If anything, the sunflower butter was a little more prominent than I intended, and the overall impression is "cornbread plus peanut butter, but not quite."

My main complaint is that the muffins still ended up pretty crumbly, which I think is partly attributable to my forgetting one of my "fake eggs".  I added just two tablespoons of corn starch instead of four (D'oh!), which means there wasn't as much binding as there should have been.  Other than that, the only thing I might change on the next try is to swap some of the sunflower butter for corn or sunflower oil, to reduce that "peanut-buttery" aspect of the flavor a bit.

In the next post, I'll get to the no-pectin quickie blueberry jam that was the real reason for making these muffins in the first place.

Baked Acorn Squash

Acorn squash is one of several comfort foods that I strongly associate with my paternal grandmother’s Southern-influenced cooking.  I’m sure that I ate it on other occasions during my childhood, but my memories of consuming this squash always seem to be tied to Grandma Geneva’s kitchen table.  I haven’t had the dish in years, but I’ve been thinking about squash lately for this diary.  Perhaps as a result, the sight of the acorn squash at my local Schnucks got me pining for that distinctive taste.

Acorn squash is the mature fruit of Cucurbita pepo, an annual flowering forb/vine in the cucumber family, Cucurbitaceae. Many of the familiar domesticated squashes are varieties of the single species C. pepo, including yellow summer squash, yellow crookneck squash, spaghetti squash, delicata squash, pattypan squash, zucchini, and some varieties of pumpkin.  Acorn squash is one of the so-called winter squashes, in that it is harvested when the fruit is fully mature.  Consequently, the rind of the fruit is thick and tough, which provides some measure of protection during storage.  As a result, the fruit resists spoilage well into the winter months, hence the “winter squash” appellation.

C. pepo has been cultivated in the Americas for thousands of years, and may have been independently domesticated twice.  There is evidence of cultivation of a C. pepo progenitor in Oxaca, Mexico as early as 10,000 years ago (8,000 BCE), which would make it a much older food crop than the other two staples of Mesoamerican agriculture, corn and climbing beans.  Squash cultivation eventually spread northward from Mexico, into the present-day United States.  However, there is evidence that C. pepo was domesticated separately in the eastern United States as early as 5,000 years ago (3,000 BCE).  In fact, the archaeological site that provides this dating (Phillips Spring) is located in the Pomme de Terre River valley in west-central Missouri.   As it happens, this “American” lineage of cultivated C. pepo--as opposed to the “Mexican” lineage--is a candidate for the ancestor of acorn squashes.

Baking acorn squash is pretty easy.  Almost all recipes can be summed up thusly: halve, seed, add a little fat and sugar, then bake for an hour or so.  And rightly so: Anything beyond that and you’re gilding the lily, in my opinion.  The main variation you’ll see on this formula is the addition of hot and/or savory spices, sometimes in place of the sugar.  Some examples:

• Baked Acorn Squash by Cathy Lowe (Food Network)
• Baked Acorn Squash with Brown Sugar and Butter by Paula Deen (Food Network)
• Baked Acorn Squash by Martha Stewart
• Acorn Squash by terrylee51 (Allrecipes.com)
• Baked Acorn Squash by corwyn darkholm (Allrecipes.com)

My goal was simply to prepare the squash in this spirit, but without butter or sugar. At my local Schnucks I found Big Chuy acorn squash, which are grown in Mexico.  When seasonal eating is the goal, preparing acorn squash throughout autumn and winter is appropriate, given the fruit’s hardiness following harvest.

I halved the squash lengthwise (stem to tip) and scooped out the seeds and string, separating the seeds out for roasting (more on this at a later date).  I then scored the inside of the seed cavities with a small knife.

Okay, what about butter?  Dairy products are generally out of the question if adherence to American foodstuffs is the goal. Of the handful of mammal species domesticated in the Americas, only the alpaca appears to have been utilized for its milk, and that milk evidently isn't too palatable. And Peru is pretty far afield from the Mississippi Valley, anyway...

No problem.  The growing popularity of vegan cooking has expanded the options for dairy substitutions.  When cooking from American origin, one loses access to those Old World fat staples, the olive and rapeseed (the source of canola oil).  However, there are plenty of other options to be found in the oils and butters derived from native grains, nuts, and seeds, and in pureed native fruits.  In this instance, I turned to sunflower oil, specicially Hain Pure Foods 100% Expeller Pressed Sunflower Oil.

American origin substitutions for sugar are more limited, but the Big One is easy to obtain: maple syrup.  I used SpringTree Maple Syrup, Grade A.  The darker Grade B works just fine, however, and is generally less expensive.  One of my goals in the near future is to find a cheap source of Grade B syrup in larger quantities.

I used a silicone pastry brush to coat the inside of the seed cavities with sunflower oil, then drizzled about 2 teaspoons of maple syrup into the cavity of each half.  I placed the halves in a baking pan with a little bit of water and baked at 400° degrees for 60 minutes.  There was a little excess oil and syrup in the cavities after baking, which I just drained off.

The flesh of the fruit can be eaten right out of the rind; a grapefruit spoon works well for this.  If they aren't eaten right away, the squash halves can be wrapped in aluminum foil and refrigerated.  One to two minutes in the microwave will do to resuscitate them.