Healthy Quinoa Jambalaya

This week Mel and I found out that we are going to be living 4 months together in Calgary for our last year of pharmacy rotations. This will give us tons of time to cook things together and be creative. I think we come up with some of the better recipes when we are together; I am more of the structured person in the kitchen, thinking logically before adding an ingredient and how much of each ingredient should be added, which sometimes can cause me to be less creative and miss out on adding different unique ingredients. Mel on the other hand has no patience in the kitchen and doesn't like to think about things before she does it so she just throws random ingredients in. This makes her recipes really unique with creative and cool ingredients but can sometimes make her recipes go awry.

This quinoa jambalaya is one of my favourite recipes we have made together and represents the balance between our two cooking styles when we work together.

Ingredients:
746 ml Can of Tomatoes
1 cup Quinoa
4 Chicken Chorizo organic sausage (we found this at the Strathcona Farmer's Market I'm not sure where else you can find it, so you can just replace it with normal chorizo if need be, it just won't be quite as healthy)
~1 1/2 cups Reduced sodium chicken broth
2 Large carrots
1 Onion
1 Red pepper
1 Jalapeno
2 stalks celery
2 cloves garlic
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp each of: chili powder, cumin, red hot chili flakes, hot paprika
1 tbsp olive oil

Step 1: Empty the juices from the tomato can into a 2 cup measuring cup. Top off the remaining amount with the chicken broth until it makes up 2 cups. Bring to a boil in a saucepan and then add the quinoa. Turn to low and cook for 15 minutes.

Step 2: Chop the chorizo into about half inch thick pieces. Ours was frozen so we had to cook it a bit before we could do this. Chop the onion and cook with the chorizo until no longer pink.

Step 3: Have your sous chef chop up all the vegetables. We grated the carrots but chopped the rest of the vegetables and minced the jalapeno and garlic

This is my sous chef hard at work ;)

Step 4: Mix all the spices into a bowl with the oil and mix well adding it to the chorizo in the pan. Add all the vegetables to the onion and chorizo and cook for about 5 minutes- we both prefer our vegetables still a bit crunchy but if you like yours completely soft you can cook it for longer

Step 5: Add the can of tomatoes and the quinoa to the vegetable mix and simmer for about 10 minutes. Mel hates chunky tomatoes but I love them so we had to compromise and blended it up slightly with the immersion blender before adding.

We topped ours with green onions to serve

-A

Jalapeno Hummus

I got accepted into a pharmacy course in Italy this spring and I am leaving in less than two months! This realization has really inspired me to eat healthy over the next couple of months so I can be in shape for this trip. After looking extensively at pictures online (when I should be studying), I realized that the majority of my trip is going to be a food festival, eating pizza, pasta, cheese and drinking wine and limoncello pretty much everyday. This is inevitable, so it made me think I should probably be in the best shape going into this trip so I only come back a small whale. On average, I would say I eat quite healthy on a day to day basis and even though I don't eat a lot of processed foods, I am going to try and decrease this amount even more over the next couple of months.
One processed food I eat every single day is hummus. At school, I always have hummus for lunch. Although the hummus we buy is scrumptious and so convenient, it probably has a lot of unnecessary oil and salt in it that I don't need so I decided I should stop being lazy and make some myself and that's what led to this recipe.

Jalapeno Hummus:

Ingredients:
2 tbsp Tahini
1 whole Jalapeno
1 clove of garlic
1/4 tsp of Cumin
1 can of rinsed chickpeas
1/4 cup of plain greek yogurt
1 tsp water
1 tsp oil
1/2 tsp sesame oil
Juice from half of a lemon
1/2 tsp salt

Usually when I make hummus I add way more garlic, but since I am taking this to school I thought I'd spare my peers. I also usually add a lot more olive oil because it gives it a nice taste and creamy texture but in the interest of health I substituted a lot of that oil with greek yogurt.

The recipe is very easy, just take all of your ingredients and dump them into a food processor until the mixture is smooth.

I usually eat it with pita chips but red pepper slices, carrots or celery work well too! Remember that although hummus tastes good, it is still made with beans so be careful not to eat too much :)
-A