My-Sweet-Take-on-Tabbouleh Salad (Gluten-Free | GF)

My-Sweet-Take-on-Tabbouleh Salad (Gluten-Free | GF)

I have a special spot in my heart for quinoa. It's versatile, filling, & known for it's high protein content. One day I bought quinoa from Bulk Barn & on my way out of the mall, I walked by a Mediterranean restaurant at the food court called Villa Madina. I've had tabbouleh plenty of times, but as I glanced over the tabbouleh this time, the first thing that crossed my mind is that I could use quinoa as a substitute to make tabbouleh.

Since then I've been using quinoa to make tabbouleh salad instead of bulgur wheat which is used in traditional tabbouleh recipes. However, the other day while making tabbouleh, I was snacking on red grapes & I thought red grapes would taste really nice with this salad.

I loved the end result, so I thought I'd share the recipe. I must warn you though, I don't have exact measurements. It all depends on your liking - if you like a lot of lemon juice, onions, or salt, then go for it. Personally, I'm not the biggest fan of the strong flavour of parsley, which is a bit odd considering that parsley is one of the main ingredients in tabbouleh. But that's exactly why I didn't add as much parsley as most people would & added more grapes instead.


Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup of chicken broth
  - OR 1/3 Maggi chicken bouillon cube dissolved in 1/2 cup of water
• 1/4 cup quinoa
• 1/2 English cucumber
• 2 tomatoes 
• 1/2 red onion 
• 40 seedless red grapes 
• handful of mint 
• 2 to 3 handfuls of flat-leaf parsley
• juice of 3/4 of a lemon 
• salt 
• ground black pepper 

Method:

1. Bring the chicken broth (or 1/3 chicken bouillon cube dissolved in 1/2 cup of water) to a boil. Add the quinoa & let it cook for 20 minutes or till the quinoa absorbs all of the liquid & it is cooked properly. Once it is cooked, let it cool. If there is some liquid remaining & the quinoa is already cooked through, use a sieve to strain the excess liquid.
2. Cut the cucumber, tomatoes, red onion, grapes, mint, & parsley. I didn't dice everything into small pieces & I cut the grapes in half. 
3. Season with lemon juice, salt, & ground black pepper.

Chef's notes:

1. I prefer cooking quinoa in chicken broth (preferably homemade) as it adds a lot of flavour to the otherwise bland quinoa. Alternatively, you can cook 1/4 cup of quinoa in 1/2 cup of water. You can also try adding a pinch of salt to the water before adding the quinoa.
2. You can take out the seeds in the cucumber & tomatoes, but I was eating the salad right away, so I didn't mind leaving them in. If you plan on storing the salad, you might want to take out the seeds so that the salad doesn't get too watery.
3. Traditional recipes of tabbouleh include a bit of olive oil, but I skip it.

xoxo

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Stuffed Zucchini Boats

Stuffed Zucchini Boats

While browsing through Pinterest, I found a picture captioned "Stuffed Zucchini Boats". The recipe was easy and the boats looked great, so I knew I'd try it one day. That day came this week and mine turned out great!

I've never cooked zucchini before and I wasn't sure how tender it is. So I only looked at the recipe to make sure that it didn't mention boiling the zucchini first.

I'm not going to be providing exact measurements because I'm not sure about the quantities that I used. I didn't follow a recipe and I highly suggest that you let your taste buds guide you too.

Cut the zucchini in half lengthwise and scoop out the zucchini flesh.

In the recipe that I saw on Pinterest, this was done using a melon scooper/baller. I don't have one of those so I used a good old teaspoon and it worked just fine too.

Here are the ingredients that I chopped and mixed together to use for the filling:

• Zucchini flesh (that you scooped out)
• Red pepper
• Yellow pepper
• Scallions (also known as green onions, spring onions, etc.)
• Onion
• Carrot
• Feta cheese
• Ground beef (cooked with a bit of oil and salt)
• Green chillies
• Lemon juice
• Cumin powder
• Freshly ground black pepper
• Salt
• Olive Oil

Remember: These are just ingredients that I had and wanted to use. I originally planned on adding tomatoes, quinoa, boneless chicken (instead of ground beef), & cilantro too, but I had enough filling & then some more, so I didn't.

Lightly coat the bottom of a baking dish with olive oil. Place your filled zucchini boats in the dish and bake for 25 minutes.

& your Stuffed Zucchini Boats are ready to be served!

I had some filling leftover, so I served it in a bowl on the side.

I actually liked the room temperature filling mixture more than the baked one. If you'd like, you can bake the empty zucchini boats (with the flesh already scooped out) till they're tender. Once you've pulled them out of the oven, you can fill them up with the room temperature mixture.

The possibilities are endless.

Hope you try & enjoy!

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Cake Pops Disaster Turned Good

Cake Pops Disaster Turned Good

In a previous post on my rushed & simple New Year's eve eye makeup look, I mentioned that I decided to try making cake pops for the first time.

Well, as you can tell from the title, the cake pops were a disaster! Most of the cake pops recipes that I read online listed frosting as one of the ingredients but I refused to buy frosting because a) I strongly dislike it, & b) I thought the cake pop would be way too sweet if I mixed frosting & chocolate cake & then dipped that in milk chocolate & topped it off with some more sweet decorations.

So leaving out the frosting, I decided to crumble some cake mix & make balls out of that. The balls weren't binding as well as I wanted them to & when I placed them on a lollipop stick & tried dipping them in  melted milk chocolate, they started falling apart. The process was so time consuming & messy that I was frustrated & was ready to throw away the cake mix, the balls, & the broken balls. My mum, dad, & uncle kept me going though & I decided I'd make cake balls instead of cake pops.

I used Betty Crocker's Super Moist Devil's Food cake mix & baked the whole cake, but ended up using only about half of the cake for these chocolate balls. While making the chocolate balls I mixed in some of the melted milk chocolate, which helped bind the balls. After I was done making all the balls, I dipped a few of them in chocolate all the way around & I dipped the rest only halfway. I put them in the fridge for the melted chocolate to set a bit so that the decorations/toppings wouldn't sink in to the chocolate. I took the balls out of the fridge after 15 minutes or so, decorated them with coloured round sprinkles & stars & put them back in the fridge till about half an hour before it was time to serve them.

I just thought I'd share my experience since I've been seeing pictures of cake pops pop up everywhere, but my first time trying them out wasn't good. I'm glad I was able to make it work though & if someone out there ends up having problems with cake pops, I hope you don't give up & make some cake balls instead because they're delicious!

Have you tried making cake pops? How was your experience?

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