Quinoa w/ Sweet Potato & Garden Peppers
This is one of those recipes that you can keep on using throughout the seasons, sweet potato and garden vegetable quinoa is one of my favorites. Feel free to substitute your vegetables of choice to make it your own in this one pot meal! Although I used sweet potatoes, garlic, shallots, lemons, bay leaves, tri-color quinoa, and homegrown tomatoes, bell peppers, banana peppers, jalapeños, and habaneros.
Equipment
- Rice Cooker
Ingredients
- 1 sweet potato diced
- 1 tomato diced
- 1 red bell pepper diced
- 2 banana peppers diced
- 1 jalapeño minced
- 2 habaneros minced
- 3 cloves garlic minced
- 1/2 shallot minced
- 1 lemon juiced
- 3 bay leaves
- 1 tsp. cumin
- dash salt
- dash pepper
- 1 c. tri-color quinoa
- 3 c. water
Instructions
Dice Vegetables
- Dice or mince all of the vegetables. Dice the sweet potatoes, tomato, bell pepper, and banana pepper. Mince the jalapeño, habaneros, garlic and shallots.Make sure to devein and deseed the bell peppers. The innards are edible, but rather bitter if you leave them in. I like to slice the sweet potatoes, cut them in half, and then in thirds. As with a small pizza, this makes 6 slices (one in half and then an X). That's how I make triangles, instead of cubes.
Cook Quinoa
- Add all of the ingredients into a rice cooker. I like to start with the larger vegetables and then add the smaller ingredients. Top with the bay leaves, spices, and lemon juice. And then add the quinoa and water.This cooks the larger vegetables on the bottom, while dispersing the flavor profiles in the middle. Although with some mixing, this really doesn't matter all that much. Everything will eventually cook together!
- Press the cook button on the rice cooker. It should take about 45 minutes to cook.
- When the quinoa is fully cooked, let sit for 10 minutes, and then fluff with a wooden spoon and serve.Do not use a fork or other metal utensil. It will scratch off the nonstick surface on the rice cooker. This will leach teflon into your food and cause future dishes to stick to the bottom.
Tips, Tricks, & Notes
- While quinoa is not rice, it does cook the same and oftentimes better than rice in a rice cooker. For more tips and tricks to rice cooker quinoa, check out my article on The Fundamentals of Making Quinoa, including a stovetop version if you don't have or don't want to use a rice cooker.
- I also tend to prefer tamari over soy sauce. They're both made from fermented soy and a lot of recipes use them interchangeably. Tamari tends to have a richer flavor and less salt content. It also tends to be gluten free.