On Quinoa: Why it is not as bad as I feared

Take this in a sharp contrast to the previous post, about couscous.

I had such high hopes for what I thought was a new form of grain, made it several ways only to be disappointed every time.

Quinoa was different, I'd always heard it as being extra 'healthy' something people who didn't like rice or even brown rice ate. For the rich people who didn't like flavor I was told. In comedy people often made fun of the grain, implying it was the food for snobs or health freaks.

I'm neither of those things, generally speaking. Yes I would like to eat healthy eventually but only as a matter of principle because I should be eating healthily. It's not as if I want to live an ascetic life, deprive myself the pleasures of the flesh and the tongue. I love butter, I love fat and spices, and eat bread on an extremely regular basis. So Quinoa was not for me, I always thought. Dry and boring-looking, it looked light brown or grey in color, not at all a fair comparison to bright-white rice or the shiny noodles. Never once in my life did I seriously consider eating it out of my own conscious choice. I may have consumed it once or twice or thrice unknowingly when there were no other option  or when I was trying to be more open to all kinds of food, but it was only that. No further complexity beyond that.

Once the couscous fiasco ended, I realized I needed to be buying more grains, the easiest one was quinoa I got a decent sized pack from Aldi, looked up a few quick recipes of it and tried cooking it...boiling it on the strove...several times.

Don't add fat while boiling it, the fat will congeal and not let the cooked grains be grainy anymore. Don't move the liquid around a lot when boiling, or the individual grains will lose their internal structure and mix into a gloopy mush. Avoid adding too much water or it'll turn into a soup. Cook for fifteen minutes covered, and ten minutes uncovered until the grains go white and look 'unpopped'.

Simple things about a single food.

And it's been great, actually, much to my surprise. Anything this healthy, supposedly, wasn't meant to be this good-tasting When it's the right texture, it's sot and fluffy, goes well with everything you eat rice with, the flavor's not too bad, the texture's tolerable, and you get full faster than you do with rice. Plus, since the grains are smaller, you see a lot more 'food' being eaten compared with people who strictly eat large-grain rice.

I'm going to be expanding my repertoire with the grain, and try making so many new things with it. Exciting is good.