Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Not everything that's cool is science, but everything in science is cool. That may not be one of those universal rules, but from everything I've seen, it's true nonetheless." -- Phil Plait, Bad Astronomy, 2013-03-04

I am an improvisational cook. With a terrible habit of never taking notes, and not following recipes (including my own). This has occasionally made things awkward when someone has asked me for the recipe for something I made that they liked. Here, I shall try to remember how I made last night's dinner. Consider this an experiment in note taking. This all started with Mom saying, "How about quinoa for dinner?" Other than the garlic, I didn't begin with much idea of what I was going to do ... As usual, some ideas didn't occur to me until my eyes passed over a potential ingredient.

Yes, the quantities are vague. I never remember that I should have measured them until later, when I think, "Maybe I want to remember how I made that." Whoops.

1 cup quinoa
1 large jalapeño
2 cloves garlic
some^[1] salt
1 splash olive oil
1 wee pile of mustard seeds
1 sprinkle of celery seed
about a quarter of a pinch of curry leaf
1 largeish sweet onion
2 medium ripe bell peppers
1 handful fresh parsley

Rinse the quinoa, then dump it in a pot with a little salt and 1.5 cups of water. Cover, heat to boiling, then reduce heat to low and simmer for 15 minutes.

While the water is heating up, coarsely chop the garlic and jalapeño (leave the veins and seeds in the jalapeño unless you really can't take much heat at all in your food^[2]) and add them to the quinoa+water.

Also at this time, start heating a small puddle of olive oil in a cast iron skillet, with a small pile of mustard seeds in the middle. Sprinkle celery seed (not much, just enough to tell that some came out of the jar) and the tiny bit of curry leaf.

Chop the onion into chunks large enough to be identifiable as onion after they've cooked. When the mustard seeds start exploding, throw the onion in the skillet (right away, to stop the mustard seeds from flinging themselves all over the kitchen[3]. Come back to stir those once in a while while doing the next steps, and plan to take them off the heat when half the onion bits are starting to get a layer of browned spices on 'em and the other half are translucent. Add the cooked onion to the quinoa (whether the quinoa has finished simmering or not).

Seed and chop the bell peppers (I used one large red one and one small orange one) into bits between pinkie-nail and thumbnail sized. In the finished dish, they should be crunchy bits of colour livening up the beige and brown of quinoa & onion.

If the fifteen minutes for quinoa-simmering is ended, take it off the stove and stir in the chopped bell peppers. Let it sit, uncovered, for five minutes.

Chop the parsely fairly fine -- not to powder or mush, but fine enough that it can't tangle itself if you try to pick up any one bit. Y'know, a couple of passes with the knife across the pile on the cutting board in different directions and call it done.

When everything else has had its five minutes, transfer it to a serving bowl and put the chopped parsely as a layer on top.

I put freshly-ground black pepper on mine; Mom didn't.

It came out well. Today Mom said that the leftovers were good cold. Mom almost never eats leftovers -- usually I eat them or they go bad -- so I guess she really liked this.

This is one of the few places where jalapeño is my first choice, instead of being what I settle for when I don't have seranno peppers. (I think it'd work with a different chili pepper, but I had the jalapeño flavour in mind when I thought to add something hot.)

Note that this is a first-draft dish -- improvised once: not refined, experimented with, tweaked, or anything. I'm pretty sure it can be improved. But I'm quite happy with how it worked.

[1] I didn't use enough salt, but that was easily fixed after serving.

[2] This produced a mild burn, enough to notice that there was something hot in the dish but not hot enough to make us reach for our drinks, evenly distributed throughout instead of in surprise chunks (which is why I boiled the jalapeño and put it in right at the start -- to blend the heat through the quinoa). If you ever sprinkle cayenne on top of something, you'll probably like it. If even that sounds too hot for you, go ahead and remove the veins and seeds from the chili peppers before chopping them -- that should leave you a faint jalapeño flavour without much heat, after the boiling has done its work. Either way, it's going to be less hot than "add a whole jalapeño" makes it sound, because of the way the capsaicin is spread out. If you're a "can't have any capsaicin at all" person, you'll need to figure out some substitution for the chili pepper.

[3] They were supposed to explode, to expose their yummy insides and to tell me the oil was the right temperature, but there's that little flinging-themselves-out-of-the-skillet issue. Only three or four escaped, so it's not too bad. Just try to have the onions all ready to drop into the skillet by the time the mustard seeds start popping.