This is my first installment of Meatless Monday A-Z hosted by Heather Blackmon. She’s another great FitFluential Ambassador and I follow her Instagram feed. She always has some great food pictures so I thought I’d give this a try. This month’s challenge involves “queso” or cheese and raisins. This week I’ll be sharing a recipe I made with blue cheese. Next week I’ll hopefully share a recipe with raisins.
The idea for this recipe came to me while cooking dinner. We’ve been having a lot of rice lately and I had just read someone else’s post about cooking quinoa. If you’ve never had it before, I urge you to try it. Quinoa has many health benefits including a high protein content, there’s 24 grams of protein in 1 cup! When cooking with quinoa make sure to rinse it first. Also, I always use a mixture of chicken broth and water to boil the quinoa, this way it flavors it while cooking without having to add salt.
- cooked quinoa
- 1 cup steamed beets
- 1 tbsp finely chopped red onion
- 1 tbsp rice vinegar
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 2 tbsp crumbled blue cheese
- Mix all ingredients together in a bowl and serve.
I normally roast beets for what seems like an eternity, but while reading an old issue of Real Simple magazine I saw that you could chop beets and steam them for about 10 minutes instead. So, I decided to try that and it worked out great. The beets steamed while everything else was cooking. I used blue cheese because that’s what I had in my fridge. I’m sure you could substitute it with feta or even goat cheese.
Have you had quinoa?