I have a very cool cookbook. It was given to me by my mother-in-law early into my marriage. I always planned on using it, but you know what happens to the best laid plans...many years of spaghetti, chicken tetrazzini, and tacos.
Our grocery store recently remodeled...it's now huge and wonderful-- and even has a bulk foods section, where you scoop out foods yourself...from chocolate covered peanuts to quinoa...and it costs a lot less. I bought two cups of quinoa for about one dollar.
I had never eaten (or heard of) quinoa until I moved to Bolivia. Now everyone has heard of it and probably tried it. But it's just not the same as it is in Bolivia, where quinoa originates. So I thought I'd go back to the source and try a quinoa recipe from my Bolivian cookbook.
This cookbook is the Betty Crocker cookbook of Bolivia. I believe every family owns one and has memorized most of the recipes in it.
The best part is that it's in Spanish, so just following a recipe is a language lesson in itself. Notice the spelling of quinua...somewhere along the way, people started using an O instead of a U. I pointed out to Joaquin that if you just add a J, quinoa can spell Joaquin. He wasn't impressed.
I love the way the recipes are written. There are no lists of ingredients or numbered steps, just descriptive paragraphs that are more than enough to get you cooking like you know what you are doing.
I decided to go with quinoa with bacon and eggs, since that's what I had on hand. The recipe stated:
"Prepare la quinua como para la receta anterior."
I had to laugh. But I went back to the previous recipe and read through it to figure out how to cook the quinoa.
The previous recipe started with:
"Dos tazas de quinua lavada como se indica."
What?? So I needed to read the introductory paragraphs to make sure I had washed the quinoa like it should be washed.
The irony of all that is that my quinoa really didn't need to be washed because it's already pretty clean somehow...no gritty sand.
But here's my quinoa, washed and ready to cook.
The best part of this cookbook is that it is full of little tidbits, like an abuela passing down her cherished recipe secrets.
For example, she writes:
"La quinua tiene la particularidad de que se la cocina sin sal. Si se pone sal, no revienta."
So don't put salt in your quinoa while it's cooking...wait until it has popped open.
But what made the quinoa taste so good was toasting it in butter before boiling it. Juan Pablo likes to do this with rice, too. I love the description in the recipe:
"Refría la quinua igual que el arroz para granear, que quede ligeramente toastada (suena como si estuviera reventando)."
And sure enough, I began to hear little pops, and I knew it was almost ready.
The next part was easy...cut up some bacon and fry until it's golden.
The author suggested:
"...en la manteca del tocino fría un huevo por persona."
Nothing is wasted...so I used the bacon grease to fry the eggs.
And here's the finished plate. Now, I'm no food photographer, so it might not look that great, but Juan Pablo declared it even better than the quinoa that the cholita up the street brings him when he visits Bolivia. Quite possibly the highest compliment he's ever paid me.
Here's Joaquin's plate mid-way through the meal. The kids couldn't stop raving about it either. This is one of those meals that would be good for breakfast, lunch or dinner.
Let me know if you try it and how it turns out!
