In the Kitchen: Toasted Almond Quinoa Salad & Chia Pumpkin Muffins
This post is part of a series in which I share recipe assignments from my culinary nutrition program. Each week, we have two to three recipes to make, photograph, and review. I’ll include links to the original recipes when they’re available or to similar recipes of my own so you can follow along with me if you like.
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Toasted Almond Quinoa Salad
Notes: This is my kind of food. It’s simple and lets the ingredients speak for themselves, but it also has a bunch of different flavors and textures going on, which makes for a satisfying meal. I really enjoyed the pops of sweet dried cranberries, crunchy purple cabbage (current obsession), and the brightness from the lemon juice. It’s a beautiful dish. For modifications, I used the juice of a whole meyer lemon instead of half of a regular lemon and an extra big handful of green beans (the more greens, the better!). This is a great weeknight meal because the preparation is so minimal and the quinoa cooks in about fifteen minutes.
The original recipe doesn’t appear to be available online, but if you’re looking for similar dishes, I recommend my Moroccan-Inspired and Quick & Easy Quinoa Salads.
Chia Pumpkin Muffins
Notes: I love anything pumpkin (and cinnamon and nutmeg), so I knew I would be a big fan of the flavor. The texture is lighter than I expected given the amount of chia seeds I used, and while I wasn’t so sure about the color of the batter pre-bake (it wasn’t very appetizing), the muffins turned a lovely deep shade, almost like gingerbread. To keep them vegan, I used two chia eggs in place of hen’s eggs and swapped the honey for additional maple syrup. My local grocery stores were low on pumpkin, so I used a combination of some pumpkin I had from another recipe and made up the rest with butternut squash. I found that I had to bake them for an additional 12 minutes more than recommended. The cooking process was easy, and similar to the quinoa salad, these are doable during the workweek. Next time I may cut back on the maple syrup a bit, because I found these to be slightly too sweet for me.
A similar variation of the recipe can be found here, and if you’re really craving pumpkin (yes, it’s Spring, but who cares?), you could make my Simple Spiced Pumpkin Bread. I’m thinking that would be wonderful as muffins too.
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What are you up to in the kitchen this week?
xo
Amanda
Photography by Amanda’s iPhone.
