Chickpea Salad with Lemon and Fresh Herbs

I love simple recipes. It seems like an obvious statement but I think it merits being mentioned, especially when it comes to this recipe.

Quinoa tabbouleh

Living in a Chilean neighborhood full of street vendors selling tasty looking, cheap fried food, it would be so easy to eat out all the time. But, I’m trying to have self control, at least during the week (see my previous entry for evidence of what I do on weekends) and make healthy dishes which are both tasty and nutritious. This is one of those recipes. In fact, if I weren’t so into trying new dishes every week, I think I would make this for lunch again next week. It was that good.  It's going to be perfect for the hot summer months in Santiago and should be good for all of you up north enduring the toasty summer!

Hummus

Being in a new place like Santiago, here are a few of the things I’ve learned recently:

There’s not a lot of Middle Eastern food in Chile
1 cup of dried chickpeas produces a lot of cooked chickpeas
I’m willing to pay an obscene amount of money for tahini

Quinoa salad with avocado and lima beans

Don’t be afraid of the title. Lima beans can be tasty. And this recipe proves it. I love quinoa and all year in my co-op, I couldn’t understand why so few people in our house made it.  It’s healthy, it’s easy to make, and it’s a delicious base for so many different meals and side dishes.  As such, for my summer, El Comidista meal, with Summer Lasagna, Roasted carrots and cauliflower with orange, and Arroz con leche, I decided to make a tasty quinoa salad to round out my meal.  I’d had my eye on this recipe for some time, even though it contains those dreaded lima beans.  Rest assured, though, this quinoa comes out delicious and refreshing.

Quinoa salad with avocado and lima beans (adapted and translated from El Comidista)

Yield: Serves 4 people, almost a meal unto itself

Ingredients:  
400 gr. of quinoa
400 gr. of large lima beans (can be frozen)
1 avocado
200 gr. of radishes with their leaves
100 gr. of oak leaf lettuce
1 lemon
2 cloves of garlic
1 teaspoon of ground cumin
2 dried red peppers (optional)
Extra virgin olive oil
Freshly ground salt and pepper

Directions:
1) Begin with the dressing. Using the blade of a knife, crush and peel the cloves of garlic. Mix them in a bowl with 8 tablespoons of olive oil, the cumin, crushed red peppers (for a bit of spice), salt and pepper. Set aside.
2) Prepare the quinoa according to the directions on the package. When it’s finished cooking, set aside and allow to cool.
3) While the quinoa cooks, boil the lima beans in heavily salted water for 4 minutes. Strain and rinse with cold water before using your hands to remove the grey skin that covers the beans. (I forgot to do this and the salad was still good)
4) Remove the leaves from the radishes. Choose the good leaves, wash and dry them, set aside. Then, wash the radishes well and cut them into small pieces.
5) Peel the lemon as seen in this video, and put it in the large bowl in which you plan to serve the salad. Add the avocado, peeled and cut into chunks, and coat it well in the lemon juice so it doesn’t turn brown.
6) Combine the lima beans, quinoa, radishes, radish leaves, and the the lettuce in the bowl with the avocado. Remove the crushed garlic from the vinagrette, pour over the salad, and mix. Salt to taste and serve immediately.

Roasted carrots and cauliflower with orange

It’s not summer here in Chile (in fact it’s quite cold with none of the buildings having central heating) but I wanted to continue my stream of delicious summer dishes for everyone back in the U.S.   As such, this entry features yet another dish from my Comidista summer dinner, which I introduced with previous entry of Summer Lasagna.  Having free reign to choose whatever recipes I wanted for this meal, I decided I needed to have a theme to narrow down my choices of what to make. Looking over my list of recipes to make, I realized I had a ton of from, my favorite Spanish food blogger, which I’d never had the chance to prepare.  Seizing the opportunity to experiment, I decided my meal theme would be cold foods (for our hot summer weather), using healthy, fresh produce, and recipes from Mikel López Iturriaga’s blog, El Comidista.

One of the side dish recipes I settled on were these roasted carrots and cauliflower with orange. Great for a summer day, these have a zesty flavor and can be served warm or cold.

Roasted Carrots and Cauliflower with Orange (adapted from El Comidista)

Yield: 4-6 servings

Ingredients:
2 small heads of cauliflower (one white and the other green or purple or both white if you can’t find other colors)
4-8 carrots, depending on their size
1 large orange
1 lemon
2 cloves of garlic
1/2 teaspoon of cumin
1/2 teaspoon of spicy paprika
1 tablespoon of red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon of brown sugar
Extra virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper

Directions:
1) Fill a large pot with water, salt it, and put it to boil over high heat.
2) Peal the carrots and cut them into pieces. Cut off the trunk of the cauliflower leaving only the florets and break it into pieces. Set aside.
3) Preheat the oven to 445ºF.
4) Boil the carrots in the pot of water for 5-10 minutes or until they’re a bit soft, but not cooked all the way. Remove the carrots from the water. Add the cauliflower to the same water and boil for a minute. Rinse both carrots and cauliflower. Drain well.
5) Cut the orange and the lemon in half and set aside one half of each. Juice the other two halves and mix the juices.
6) In a small bowl, mix 2 teaspoons of the juice with the cumin, paprika, 2 cloves of garlic, crushed, vinegar, 2 tablespoons of olive oil, salt and pepper.
7) Place the cauliflower, carrots, and unsqueezed halves of lemon and orange on a baking sheet. Cover with the marinade, using your hands to mix, making sure the carrots and cauliflower are evenly coated. Place in the oven for 20 minutes until the cauliflower is soft and golden. If it’s browning too quickly, put some aluminum foil over top.
8) While that’s in the oven, mix the combined orange and lemon juice with 8 tablespoons of olive oil, the brown sugar, salt and pepper. Toss the dressing with the roasted carrots and cauliflower and serve. If you’d like it a bit bitter, you can add the juice from the roasted orange and lemon to the dressing.

Pasta Salad with Sun-Dried Tomatoes

I'm aware that I'm really terrible about posting recipes other than desserts but I want people to know that I actually do eat things other than cupcakes and cookies.  This blog might suggest otherwise, but I swear it's true and here's the proof.  I would attribute my lack of real food dishes partly to the fact that it's extremely difficult, at least for me, to take pictures of non dessert items.  As it is, my dessert pictures don't always turn out.  One day I'll get photography lessons and have a kitchen made for food blogging like this one.  The kitchen has special nook in which to take pictures of your culinary delights and lighted circles within it so you don't even need plates to photograph the food!  Completely ridiculous, yet so awesome!  And since I don't have this kind of kitchen yet, for me it's easier to save dessert items and photograph them later.  Other stuff not so much, especially when it's quickly scarfed down by my hungry co-op mates.

However, I finally made a non dessert item and remembered to photograph it, because it's really worth making.  Especially if you're trying to make a good impression.  When I made this pasta salad for my house last week I got rave reviews, which is saying something because our menu was for a “Picnic Dinner” and included pasta salad and burgers.  Sounds boring, right?  That's what my friend thought, at least until until she tasted this pasta salad.  It's more of a gourmet side, or something along those lines, pasta salad just makes it sound so dull.  And this pasta is anything but, with ingredients like sun-dried tomatoes, kalamata olives, fresh mozzarella, and fresh basil.

Pasta Salad with Sun-Dried Tomatoes (adapted from Ina Garten)

Yield: 6-8 servings

Ingredients:
1/2 pound fusilli  pasta (spirals)*
Kosher salt
Olive oil
1 pound ripe tomatoes, medium-diced
3/4 cup good black olives, such as kalamata, pitted and diced
1 pound fresh mozzarella, medium-diced
6 sun-dried tomatoes in oil, drained and chopped
1 cup freshly grated Parmesan
1 cup packed basil leaves, julienned

For the dressing:
5 sun-dried tomatoes in oil, drained                             1 garlic clove, diced     
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar                                   1 teaspoon capers, drained
6 tablespoons good olive oil                                        3/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 teaspoons kosher salt

 Directions:
1) Cook the pasta in a large pot of boiling salted water with a splash of oil to keep it from sticking together. Boil for 12 minutes, or according to the directions on the package. Drain well and allow to cool.
2) Place the pasta in a bowl and add the tomatoes, olives, mozzarella, and chopped sun-dried tomatoes. 3) For the dressing, combine the sun-dried tomatoes, vinegar, olive oil, garlic, capers, salt, and pepper in a food processor until almost smooth.
4) Pour the dressing over the pasta, sprinkle with the Parmesan and basil, and toss well.

* We didn't have any spiral pasta but I would use it because the spirals look prettier