ANITA L. ARAMBULA
Confessions of a Foodie
Ilove a good grain salad. They pack great as a main for lunch and play well as a side dish to proteins. Farro, wheat berry and quinoa are among my favorite salad grains. The first two have a great chew to them, giving anything they’re added to some texture and heft, while lighter — though no less satisfying — quinoa is the perfect canvas to absorb added flavors.
Quinoa is the base for today’s salad, but your favorite grain could easily swap in for it. You’ll just need to adjust the cooking time and method according to your grain of choice.
This salad has raw red onions, but don’t panic: I tame them by getting them into lemon juice as the first step. Hanging out in the acid bath will take the edge off of it.
The secret to today’s salad begins with the flavors cooked into the quinoa. After rinsing the grain well, adding it and the water to a saucepan, I add the same ingredients I use when I make Mexican-style rice: garlic, jalapeño and Knorr chicken bouillon.
A lot of Mexican home cooks love their consomé de pollo en polvo (powdered chicken bouillon). I’d also venture to say that it’s probably one of the most frequently used ingredients for many of them. As I was growing up, my parents went through a large container of it monthly. Naturally, I use it all the time for cooking, often adding it early as the main seasoning ingredient and saving the sea salt or kosher salt as a finisher if I need more salinity in a dish. I like the flavor of bouillon, although I know of some cooks who don’t feel it brings much to the party other than salt and prefer something more along the lines of Better Than Bouillon. Like my parents, I prefer Knorr. The best way to choose is to pick up small containers of each and use them in various recipes to decide for yourself. Of course, if you have a fantastic-tasting homemade broth sitting in your fridge or freezer, by all means, use it instead. It will be tastier than anything you get in a jar.
As for the jalapeño, I leave it whole, so it doesn’t overpower the quinoa with its heat. However, I still want the quinoa to absorb the pepper’s essence, so I slit an “X” in the pepper’s tip about an inch deep, then add the pepper to the water. The slit allows the water to enter the pepper, coming into contact with the interior but keeps the seeds in place, so there’s no chance of them becoming the dominant flavor profile. This is a trick I do whenever I add whole jalapeños to the cooking liquids of grains, beans, soups and stews.
I fluff the cooked quinoa with a fork, pulling out the garlic and jalapeño; they’ll become part of the dressing. At this point, you could stop and simply enjoy one of my favorite bites of cooked quinoa as a side dish to grilled chicken or pork chops. It is so good that while I was chopping vegetables for the salad, I couldn’t stop stealing forkfuls of it straight out of the cazuela (the earthenware that I cook my quinoa in).
Using a knife, I mash the garlic that I fished out of the quinoa against the surface of my cutting board, then I stir it into the red onion and lemon juice mixture. I mince the cooked jalapeño before adding it, too, along with cumin and a pinch of salt. I drizzle in my favorite California olive oil and let the mixture hang out while the quinoa cools, and I prep the rest of the ingredients.
Brined pitted green olives are a must in the salad for added pops of salt and acidity. I sliced and added Moroccan pitted green olives that I had in my pantry, but Spanish olives would work just as well. The rest of the ingredients add earthiness, sweetness, crunch and a different kind of heat: roughly chopped cilantro, diced orange bell pepper (red would work here, too), and radish matchsticks. Radishes play a big part in a Mexican pantry and show up in many dishes. I’ve known some folks who even serve them raw and whole alongside bowls of soup and alternate between slurping up soup and biting into a radish. Radish adds a piquancy that translates into just a bit of heat on the palate and an excellent crunchy bite to so many dishes. Not to be left out, guisados (stews), salads and even green moles all benefit from the addition of radish leaves.
The finished Mexican-inspired quinoa salad is slightly spicy from jalapeño, sour from the green olives, lemony from the dressing and packed with crunch from radishes, bell peppers and red onions. I find that it tastes great warm, cold and at room temperature, making it one of my favorite dishes for meal prepping.