Green Cuisine: Mexican Quinoa Salad

Photo credit: net_efekt on Flickr

My friend Kyna has been somewhat of a food inspiration to me recently. After a delicious vegetarian dinner at her house in the fall, I decided to take the plunge and cook vegetarian at home. This week, she whipped up a nice little quinoa salad for lunch and I was hooked. So tonight, I made this:

Mexican Quinoa Salad
-3 cups cooked quinoa
-1 can black beans, rinsed
-1 cup corn
-2 tomatoes, diced
-1 small red onion, diced
-1 avocado, diced
-Salt to taste

I also tossed together some local organic greens with locally made Natalie Robyn's cherry vinegarette dressing.

Quinoa took less than 15 minutes to cook. I usually make this dish with rice, which takes 45 minutes. Not only did this save time, that's a lot of cooktop energy saved. Another great thing about quinoa, it's a complete protein, making it a great addition to vegetarian dishes. I'm going to try to soak the seeds in water (for just 2-4 hours apparently) and let it sprout, boosting its nutritional value even more. Am I gushing about quinoa? Yes, it's true. And you will too.

It was a delicious meal, very satisfying and so easy. And it was completely plant based (and all organic). It feels good to feed my family something so pure. And with the oil spill weighing so heavily on my mind, it feels good to eat in a low impact way.

Here is what dinner looked like. Mmmgood.

Week 3: Meat free meals

Photo credit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/32599519@N02/ / CC BY 2.0

In November I stopped cooking meat at home. I had been wanting to reduce our meat consumption for a while, but it just seemed so hard to change all of my regular recipes for new vegetarian ones. It turned out that it wasn't as hard as I had feared to kick the meat habit.

I started with a one-month commitment, figuring we could go without until the Thanksgiving turkey. I don't keep secrets from my husband, but I made an exception and didn't tell him we about eating meat for the first week. I wanted to make sure this commitment was going to stick, and I figured once I got a few tasty meatless meals in him he would not protest.

It turns out I had nothing to fear. I had to step out of my recipe comfort zone (some may refer to as a rut) and find new ones, but I discovered many easy, delicious, and satisfying meals that my husband and three-year old both love. I even made lasagna for my in-laws with vegetarian sausage that they raved about. Now we've been doing this for 6 months and it has just become our routine.

There is a wonderful effort called the PB&J Campaign, a campaign to reduce the amount of animal products people eat by encouraging people to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead of meat and dairy. Really, any plant-based meal will do, but a PB&J is something pretty familiar to even the biggest meat-lovers, and tasty too. It is a fun way to think about reducing your footprint, but the impact is quite significant. According to their website:

-Each time you have a plant-based meal like a PB&J sandwich you reduce your carbon dioxide emissions over an animal-based meal by 2.5 pounds for lunch.

-If you have a PB&J instead of red meat, you reduce your carbon footprint by 3.5 pounds.

-You also save a whopping 133 gallons of water at lunch, and 24 square feet of land from deforestation and pollution.

Holy cow!

The numbers don't work out perfectly, as my family does eat dairy and eggs, but on average my family is saving:
-22.5 pounds of carbon each day, 540 pounds each month, and about 7000 pounds per year;
-7128 gallons of water per week, or 373,000 per year; and
-1296 square feet of land each week.

That's nothing to shake a stick at.

I'm thoroughly convinced that anybody can do this. You get to make rules that work for your family, whether you want to remove meat at one meal per week or avoid all animal products each July. In our family, we don't eat meat at home, but we eat whatever we want at restaurants (we eat out about once a week). We also occasionally cook meat for visitors and on special occasions, like that Thanksgiving turkey. We also happen to really like peanut butter and jelly.