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STEPS
INGREDIENTS
Add 1/2 cup water to the saucepan. Do this step three times if you are not using chicken broth. Depending on the amount of quinoa you're going to want more or less liquid.
Add 1/2 cup orange juice to your saucepan. This gives the quinoa a little bit of a sweet taste.
Turn on your burner to medium-high.
I'm using the whole box for my recipe. We like leftovers.
Yay, super grain!
Into the saucepan!
Stir to get it started.
That was me adding more water because I forgot to at the beginning. Silly me.
Keep stirring every once and a while.
My pot. Yup. The quinoa will probably take about ten minutes.
In the meantime, prep your olives.
Open the can with your futuristic device known as "the can-opener." Creative, right?
Drain the olives into the sink.
Now, this step is very important. Place an olive on each of your fingers. This is a vital step, do not skip.
And the olive monster strikes again and eats all of the olives on its fingers.
GRRRR....
Now stop being silly and cut your olives.
While I was eating- ahem, cutting the olives, my mother shelled about a cup or so of pistachios.
This is what the quinoa should look like when done. All liquid should have been absorbed.
Pile the quinoa into a large bowl.
Spread it out to cool faster.
Done with your olives?
Add them to the bowl.
Chop the ends off of the bunch of cilantro. Some people don't like cilantro. Did you know that liking cilantro is a genetic thing? Some people have the gene some people don't. Weird, right?
Dump the leaves into your handy dandy food processor. Can you imagine having to do that by hand?
Add a lot of cumin.
And a dash of cayenne pepper. Not too much, mind you.
Peel only two cloves of garlic. I added three to my pesto this time and it was a bit much so I would recommend only two unless you really love garlic.
Dump them into the processor.
Drizzle in some olive oil. I bet I used about a tablespoon but use as much as you need to get the pesto consistency.
Here we are.
Squeeze in some lemon juice.
Add the pistachios into the quinoa and stir.
Pulse the crap out of the pesto.
Add a goodly bit of salt to the pesto.
Blend again. You may need to scrape the sides to fully incorporate all of the ingredients.
Remove the blade from the processor an set it aside.
Chop up any color pepper. We usually use red but this time we used orange.
There you go.
Gather them up and dump them into the quinoa mix.
Discard of the pepper scraps into a trash can or compost heap.
Incorporate the peppers.
Spoon all of the pesto into the salad.
The final product! Sorry for the blurriness. Serve right away! It's best when it's fresh.
Enjoy! I known I did!
This dish is best served with a heartier meat or fish, not chicken. We eat ours with lamb kabobs marinated in cilantro, garlic, and spices with a tomato and avocado salad and sautéed carrots.