In an effort to break away from my library books, I browsed my cookbook shelf to find a cookbook that hasn't received a lot of love from me. While scanning the titles, I was saddened that most of my cookbooks fall into that category. Undaunted, I selected my Moosewood Cooks at Home book and found the Peruvian Quinoa Stew recipe. With a new unopened bag of quinoa at home, this seemed like an obvious recipe to try.
The recipe was incredibly healthy – vegetables and ground spices – and very easy to prepare by using the Instant Pot to cook quinoa. Amazingly, quinoa cooks perfectly in 1 minute at high pressure!
And I didn't need to use the oil recommended to coat the pot – no sticking occurred, similar to my omission of oil for my Instant Pot cooked steel cut oats.
As the quinoa was separately cooking, I built the stew base with the vegetables and spices. I used a full Pomi chopped tomatoes box in the stew, so I had slightly more tomatoes (3 cups) than called for in the original recipe.
Unlike Indian recipes, you don't bloom the dried spices in the oil before adding the other ingredients, rather you add the spices when the vegetables go into the pot. I was slightly worried that the spices wouldn't full blend into the soup using this method, but I was thankfully surprised by the result. And a note for myself – I halved the coriander powder because of personal preference, and it worked out fine in the final dish.
The quinoa was great when served – incredibly tangy from the tomatoes; slightly sweet, sour and spicy from the spices; and very filling from all of the vegetables and quinoa. The only downside of this dish is that I think it's meant more for a crowd (it comfortably serves 5 as a main course) or to eat over a week, versus the 2 days in which we quickly ate it up (and got a little sick of it). I will be making this again and again, particularly in winter when it will help warm me on cold days.
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