Congratulations, you! You’re reading my first ever blog post on food. Many years have gone by since a friend encouraged I start blogging, and blog a little, I did. Then an unintended three-year hiatus happened. Tumblr took over my interest for a while, then Pinterest. I like pictures, you see. About a week ago, I realized coming back to WordPress would help me polish up my writing, and like any regimen, I hope I get better over time. Here I am now. New name, revitalized account. This is my first post on food that I’m actually sharing with the world, and you’re reading it. Felicidades.
About a week ago, I used our juicer for the first time. It’s been years since we first got it as a Christmas present, so I thought I’d give it some attention. I first learned about juicers and the juicing trend during college when one of my roommates brought her hefty centrifugal juicer and made me some green juice. I expected it to taste bitter, but I was pleasantly surprised. It was sweet, and tasted completely of fruits. Besides consisting of kale and other green vegetables, there was just lime juice and ginger. Yeah, ginger. Who knew? I really didn’t expect it to taste as good as it did. Fast forward three years and here I am trying to recreate this juice. My first attempt was alright. I made juice. Two kinds, actually. Applause, please. The juices tasted good, too. I think the problem was with cleaning. Cleaning the produce beforehand and machinery/ kitchen cleanup afterwards made the entire process about three hours long. After I was done with all that cleaning, I didn’t really want to “juice” any time again soon. Besides, this juice was just for me, right? Wrong. Mother saw the juice. Mother drank the juice. Mother liked it. Mother said to make more.
So now, because MoThor… I mean Mother… liked it, I had to make more. [Apologies for the geeky meme inclusion. Future apologies if I do it again. I just like doing it.]
Several days ago, I pressed some juices again, using green apples, beets, and carrots for a delicious ABC (Apples, Beets, Carrots) juice, and kale, celery, spinach, lime, and ginger for a green juice. It wasn’t any easier this time, but at least I knew how to use the machine and prepared myself for all the cleaning that was to come before and after the entire process. I also made a mental note to constantly empty out the pulp bin. That thing overflowed with so much pulp the first time because I didn’t know it was full when it was. Practically exploded in my face when I removed it from the machine. It turns out that a lot of produce makes for little juice and a lot of pulp. It felt like a waste to dispose of all that the first time, so we decided to use it as fertilizer for the garden. This time, though, I thought I could make a recipe out of it, since I saw something on Pinterest that piqued my interest.
This Southwestern Quinoa Bites recipe from Fork & Beans uses the pulp left over from juicing as an ingredient, and I think it’s a clever, earth- and diet-friendly way to utilize something that will otherwise become compost.
I didn’t have many of the ingredients for this recipe, so I loosely adapted it with the Italian Quinoa Bites version.
Just a warning, my recipe adaptation — and future possible adaptations — aren’t the most precise. What I did in this case was pick and choose ingredients I had from each recipe and somehow made it work. I’m not even sure if I doubled or halved or three-quartered (or screwed up) the recipe. All I know is that I didn’t measure out a single ingredient. I just eyeballed. And I simply assumed that the called for “flaxseed meal” was ground flaxseed, so by not having flaxseed meal and only whole roasted flaxseed grains, guess what I did? I ground them in the blender. I do random things like that. I’m not even sure if this ground-flaxseed-mixed-with-water part was necessary in my cooking, but I assumed it was supposed to act as a binder for the quinoa bites, so I did it anyway.
I’ll let you know that I followed the Italian Quinoa Bites recipe more than the Southwestern one, so if you’d like to understand at least vaguely what I did, I recommend you take a look at that one. I followed the bread coating recipe, but I used about twice the amount of rice chex called for. I also seasoned it with salt, pepper, and smoked paprika, and used dry basil and no oregano or thyme (because I didn’t have any oregano, and because I love my thyme and didn’t want to waste my thyme on this recipe. Laughs, please).
For the quinoa balls, I cooked twice the amount of quinoa called for in the recipe, but used regular all-purpose flour, 2% milk, no cheese, and no fresh basil. Not really Italian without the basil or cheese, I know, but I was making my own thing. Here, I added handfuls of vegetable pulp from juicing earlier, and that mainly consisted of carrots and beets, from what I remember. I’m not even sure. Dry veggie pulp is hard to distinguish except by color. I also vaguely remember seasoning this mixture with an assortment of smoked paprika and garlic powder, and possibly some salt… and maybe cracked pepper? I can’t remember. I just knew that it didn’t taste very good, so I was trying to season it as well as I could with whatever I thought would make it taste better. Oh, I remember now. I sprinkled in some dashida, a Korean beef bouillon powder. That made it taste tons better. I formed the mixture into golf-balls, then rolled them in the crushed rice chex coating. After all that was done, I fried them in a pan swirled with extra virgin olive oil until they seemed crispy enough; first one side, then the other, in the same manner you’d cook meatballs. After frying, I moved them to a paper towel-lined plate and immediately sprinkled them with a tiny bit of Lawry’s seasoning salt (because they still tasted under-seasoned).
Now, onto the pièce de résistance: the salad! I prepared this before I started cooking the quinoa bites. I got the inspiration for the salad from another recipe I found on Pinterest (picture shared below). Just look how delicious that looks!
Again, I didn’t follow the recipe exactly. I basically made my own version of the vinaigrette, and then just tossed in sliced red cabbage, julienned beets, chopped kale (no stems), and feta cheese. No pepitas, though, porque no tengo pumpkin seeds. Here’s the original recipe for the Ruby Salad with Crumbled Feta and Spicy Pepitas, and here’s what went down in my kitchen:
I had a lot of sliced red cabbage in my fridge. Perks of owning a restaurant, I suppose. It was doomed to go bad if no one used it, so I tried juicing a little bit of it. Although cooked cabbage is sweet, raw cabbage can be bitter, so I decided not to juice any more of it. Good thing, because look at all the salad I got to make with it! I knew I had to make a vinaigrette for it because the acid in vinegar breaks down cabbage and rids it of its bitterness. The adaptation I made to the original recipe’s vinaigrette was delicious. Don’t mean to toot my own horn, but it truly was. The original recipe for the vinaigrette looks like this (allow me to copy & paste):
1 Tbs dijon mustard
2 Tbs sherry wine vinegar
2 Tbs fresh lemon juice
salt & pepper
1/4 c olive oil
But what did I do? I had no dijon mustard (gasp!), nor did I have any sherry wine vinegar or lemon juice (I admit, though, I have a lemon tree. Yes, there are lemons on it. No, I didn’t pick one just to squeeze two tablespoons of juice from it). I took from the fridge the other two types of mustard I had: stone ground and spicy brown. It was a tough decision. Trust me when I say it took three minutes. I love mustard, so stone ground would have been the mustard-ier choice, but… would that work well in this recipe? I figured my almost-deplete spicy brown was the more suitable, so although I was running out, I squeezed out about two or three tablespoons of that gold. Rummaged through the assortment of vinegars I had and settled with my Grandma’s homemade vinegar. I’m not sure what it’s made with, but it was brown and tasted mildly like apple cider vinegar, and not as acidic as distilled white. It turned out to be perfect for the salad. I poured in some, about twice the amount of mustard, and whisked. I sprinkled in salt and freshly cracked black pepper, and whisked in some extra virgin olive oil. I started out doubling the recipe, but by this time, I don’t even know how much oil I used. I think it was just 1/4 cup. I didn’t want too oily of a vinaigrette because I like tart flavors and wanted more acid to break the cabbage down. I whisked the oil in until it emulsified, took a taste, reveled a moment, then put in handfuls of sliced red cabbage (purple, according to Rachael Ray), sliced beets, and stemless kale. I like kale in my salad, but not when it’s cut in ribbons. I find it harder to get with the fork. I used kitchen shears to cut the leafy bits into small, bite-sized pieces and discarded the stems. After evenly tossing the salad with the dressing, I crumbled some feta cheese on top. Remember to add the feta after tossing, simply because beets dye everything red, and you don’t want your cheese to be red as well. I refrigerated it while I made the quinoa balls, and this allowed time for the cabbage to break down and meld together with the vinaigrette. Behold, my lunch is (finally) served:
kale, beet, and cabbage salad with quinoa bites
The reason why I made the quinoa bites was to find a way to use the leftover vegetable pulp from juicing, but I realize I hardly used any of it. I might have used “handfuls” of it, but there were plenty more “handfuls” of it left to throw away. They take too long to make, in my humble opinion, so I don’t plan to make them again. The salad, on the other hand, definitely makes up for all the cooking and cleaning I did that day. It is definitely going in my personal recipe book… if I had one.
In the meantime, I’ll try to think of other ways I can utilize juicing pulp so that it doesn’t go to waste. Maybe if I can think up something worth sharing, I’ll blog about it. Thank you heaps for reading my first post! I hope to get better at this over time, and shorten up the posts as well. Hope you’ll visit again soon!
The First Fourteen 