Day 25 – Mushroom Miracle Grain

Sorry folks for the lack of posts the last few days. It’s been a pretty busy week so far.

Anyway, in the spirit of Halloween, Jeremy and I had people over to carve pumpkins. With it being a pretty big party weekend, I didn’t really have the time or the energy to do any grocery shopping on Sunday. Since we were carving pumpkins, I wanted to use some kind of squash. I had a triple threat of having to use pantry ingredients, including a squash in the dish and keeping a meal vegan to make something for a bunch of hungry people.

Inspired by Jenna’s pumpkin basmati and this recipe from Roger Ebert’s The Pot and How to Use It, I was ready for this task.

One of my friends coming over was supposedly off of white grains for a couple of weeks so I decided to use some quinoa instead.

 

This is what quinoa looks like

 

Prior to this month, I had never heard of quinoa, much less taste or cook with it. Known as the miracle grain for its high nutrition content, this bad boy is a good source of complete proteins unlike most other plant sources. (Nutritional nerd alert note, a complete protein has adequate ratios of the 9 essential amino acids for our dietary needs. Most plant sources have some amino acids and not others, which is why mixing and matching various vegetables and/or beans make them more ‘nutritional’.)

Quinoa kind of cooks like rice – 1 part quinoa to 2 parts liquid. To impart more flavor into the grain, I used the liquid from the rehydrated dried shitake mushrooms, soy, and aromatics like ginger, onion and garlic, kind of like Roger Ebert’s recipe.

 

Rehydrated Dried Shitake Mushrooms

 

Moving on to the squash, I would’ve liked to use a pumpkin but those at the grocery store were huge and hard to maneuver. I used and acorn squash instead.

 

Acorn squash. If you can't figure out why it's called an acorn squash, well, ehm, go watch some cartoons with squirrels in them.

 

Prep wise, I halved it, got the seeds out, and nuked them in the microwave for 4 minutes so that they’re soft enough to handle. I cubed and sautéed them in some garlic, soy sauce and mirin.

After some assembly:

 

Mushroom Soy Quinoa