SUPERGRAIN!!! (aka Quinoa)

It's a bird. It's a plane. It's SUPERGRAIN!!!

image by Kurt Stueber

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Quinoa is weird. So am I. I like quinoa.

I blogged a bit about quinoa (keen-wah) in this 30 Days entry. But it keeps popping up in my life.

Today there was an article on Yahoo! News about "Quinoa's popularity boon to Bolivians." Not surprisingly, the more "First World foodies" (as the article calls us) consume quinoa, the more rural farmers can make off of it. Which, of course, gives way to concerns about over-farming and the crushing of small sustainable farmers by big commercial/government operations. Sigh. Sometimes, no good deed goes unpunished.

But for me, quinoa is great because it's overly healthy (10 essential amino acids and 14%-18% protein content) AND GLUTEN-FREE!

image by Blairingmedia

I bought a bag of red quinoa on impulse a few weeks ago because of all of the good hype. My nutrionist had given me a crockpot recipe that had "an approved grain" as one of the ingredients. So I used the red quinoa. It's great! Really filling and it was a very easy 'make'.

• Herbed Chicken & Quinoa Crockpot fun

Day 10: Quinoa

Quinoa is a gluten-free grain. It comes from the Andes Mountains of South America, but the Quinoa Corporation ships it up here. (http://www.quinoa.net/127/index.html) I think it's a funny grain, in many ways.

• It's got a funny name. Though it looks like it should be pronounced qwinn-no-uh, it's actually pronounced keen-wah.



• It's funny that it's not actual a grain. Technically, it's a seed, but here in North America we use it as, and refer to it as, a grain.



• It's funny in that every six months or so I think, "I should make something with quinoa!" And then I do. And then it's just ok, not fabulous, not horrid. Just kind of there. I have yet to find a recipe that makes quinoa pop for me.

But, as someone pointed out to me, this is a record of 30 days of things I can eat, not necessarily things I like. I can eat quinoa. And I don't dislike it, not really. I'm on the fence.

Anyone have any good quinoa recipes? I'd love to hear them and find a way to make quinoa yummy for me!