Climbing out of Winter with a Spring Meal

Yesterday we experienced the last hurrah of winter. Or at least I hope we did. When I woke up the temperature read -9°C and said that it felt like -19°C, this was a dramatic shock for us as just the day before, we were able to enjoy 12°C weather!

Thankfully today, the weather went back up to 5°C! Just the way it should be once the spring solstice comes. The spring equinox came on March 20th, this being 10 days ago!

Well, today, as the weather warmed up compared to the previous day, I decided to make a nice and light meal that had all the best flavours in it! We absolutely loved this meal, however, I can say that our feline wasn't too keen on the fact that it was vegetarian.

Rummy, trying to get some food scraps from ShoJo

What was the light meal that I ended up making that Rummy was unable to enjoy with us? I made us a quinoa meal with roasted mushrooms and fresh herbs! I got the recipe from Cookie + Kate, but I had to access my old food blog from 2014 to remember the best way to make quinoa. Her method just didn't work for me.

Here's the recipe that I followed:

Ingredients:

Mushrooms

• 3 cups crimini mushrooms, quartered

• 1 Tbsp olive oil

• 1/4 tsp salt

Quinoa

• 1 cup quinoa

• 2 cups chicken broth

• 1 cup Parmesan cheese, grated

• 1/2 cup curly parsley, chopped

• 1/4 cup green onion, sliced

• 3 cloves garlic, diced

• 1/4 tsp salt

• 1 Tbsp olive oil

• 3 Tbsp fresh lemon juice

• 3 Tbsp pepitas, toasted

Instructions:

1. Turn on oven and set at temperature at 375°F

2. In a medium pot, bring chicken broth to boil. Once boiling, add the quinoa and turn dial to low heat. Place lid on pot and allow quinoa to cook for 20 minutes.

3. Meanwhile, quarter your mushrooms and place on baking sheet. Sprinkle in olive oil and add salt to mushrooms, coat every mushroom and place in oven. Bake mushrooms in the oven with remainder time on quinoa timer. Once timer goes off, both mushrooms and quinoa will be ready.

4. While mushrooms are baking, grate Parmesan and place in a bowl. Next chop parsley and slice green onions, then dice garlic cloves, finally use lemon press to juice half of a lemon and set aside.

5. In a small saucepan, toast pepitas (raw pumpkin seeds) until slightly browned.

6. Once timer goes off, remove quinoa from hot burner and turn off oven.

7. Combine Parmesan cheese, half the parsley, green onions, garlic, lemon juice, as well as salt and olive oil with quinoa.

8. In a medium serving bowl, pour in quinoa mixture. Top with roasted mushrooms and their juices, add in toasted pepitas and other half of parsley.

9. To finish off meal, drizzle quinoa with olive oil and serve.

I really enjoyed this. In fact, I am pretty sure that my sister-in-law and mother-in-law would like this as much as I did!

The best part about this meal is that if you feel that it is lacking in protein, you need not worry as one cup of cooked quinoa contains 8 grams of protein and additionally has 5 grams of fibre! One cup of dry quinoa makes up 3 cups of cooked quinoa, so you do not need to make meat that has more protein in it if you do not want to.

My favourite part about this particular meal is that (almost) every bite has an additional bit of crunch with the toasted pepitas!

This meal gets the sharp flavour of freshly grated Parmesan, the chewy and moist taste of mushrooms, and the crunch of pepitas.

Truly delicious!

However, our cat was really unimpressed by this meal lacking in true protein. He returned after his own meal to scout out for more meat only to realize that there was nothing for him.

This poor bozo of a cat really just wanted some meat to enjoy off our plates! But do not think for a minute that he gets meat from our plates. Only my father is that cheeky with his cat.

Alas, he was out of luck. But, we got some great photos of him being a suck-up!

I hope you all enjoy this meal as much as we did!