White Girl Vegetarian cooking: it's quinoa and squash baby!
And it's KFP!
This week I’m sharing a traditional Christian Girl Autumn recipe, I know it’s April. If you’re wondering where you’re going to get a honeynut squash right now, go to your local farmers market and carry one home in a brooklinen tote bag for the full WGV experience. I don’t know if there’s anything more mid 2010s white food blogger culture than one grain and two vegetables (plus an onion) in a bowl with sauce. Like, it’s a whole genre. Is it particularly good? No. Is it particularly satisfying? Also no. Is it particularly easy? Again, not really. Why do we do it? Well, it’s easy enough, and tastes good enough, and it tastes totally fine if you eat it for lunch the next day. Also it’s so wholesome. It’s healthy, you know? You eat this and you’re like “wow, at least two of my… five a day” or whatever.
This one is easier than some (no frying pan) (unless you put a fried egg on it, the 2010s are back!!!!!). It’s a very 2016-2017 kind of meal. It’s weird that a single boring meal can instantly place me at “around the time my dad was murdered,” but whatever, food is magical that way. Eating like this makes me think of when I just moved to new york, because all the food blogger girlies at the time were about “bowl food.” Sprouted Kitchen (jesus that name) had just released Bowl + Spoon, a cookbook that I owned, and really liked… about four recipes in, which is honestly not a bad hit rate for me, their granola recipe was so good that I wrote it out by hand when I tossed the book. This is a recipe in the white girl bowl food tradition, which is very different from all of the non-white-girl bowl foods, because most of the time eating food from a bowl isn’t treated as a big revelation.
I’ve been realizing that, like many people, my idea of what is cool and fashionable completely stopped with the pandemic, and even though I leave my house now, I completely stopped understanding trends or fashion. I see people on the street and I cannot tell if they are in high school or their 20s, and I cannot comprehend what is happening. This is all to say: I also have no idea what food trends are anymore. I thought that this was still The Thing that food bloggers do, (not all of them of course, but the Love & Lemons, or Cookie & Kates, the ampersand girls) but I don’t know what’s in right now. I did a perusal of the blogs and I found a lot of like… Stuffed shells? Muffins? Chili? Reviews of tofu presses? I mean… I guess.
It’s not really seasonal, because I wrote it in the fall and didn’t publish it (depressed), but it is kosher for Passover so I’m sharing it now! Also like, by the second half of Passover I’m usually feeling a bit stumped in the mid-day zone so I thought I’d share this to give you another option (do not speak to me of breakfast it is a nightmare, I hate matzah brie and Noah always says I am antisemitic for that.) Quinoa is a SEED so you can eat it for Passover, the rabbi have decreed it. It’s good for lunch (well, it’s perfectly adequate for lunch) so this will save you from at least one day of a peanut butter and jelly on matzah sandwich. I will accept your adulation now.
Fun fact: I just imported all my old posts from my tinyletter, so if you want to know what I was cooking back in 2018… it’s there? There’s some good stuff in the archives, like the grits souffle recipe linked below!
Other KFP recipes from the archives
Baked tofu (KFP with gluten free tamari instead of soy sauce)
Dubu jorim Also KFP if you use tamari, can you tell my Passover approach? I buy tamari and almond milk and feel very diligent
White Girl Bowl Food: squash, quinoa, and arugula
1 1/2 (generous) cup water, combination water and broth, or water with yeondu (yeondu is not KFP!)
1 cup quinoa (or make farro if it’s not Passover, I had more quinoa than farro)
1 small butternut or honeynut squash
some quantity of greens (I had arugula, you can use kale (2010s!) or something else? idk)
Roasted nuts, or peels of parmersean, or both
pickled onion, or agrodolce if you have some leftover
Sauce
1 lemon, juiced
A tablespoon (?) of mayonnaise, or olive oil
1 tsp or so gochugaru (again, however much you like)
1 tbs maple syrup (makes it sweet)
1/4 tsp (if you’re measuring) MSG
Salt if necessary (I didn’t find it to be)
Set oven to 425 or 450. (Nothing matters) Peel and dice squash. Toss it on sheet pan (unlined! important! lining your sheet pan with parchment will make the squash steam (bad) and lining it with tin foil will probably mean you have to peel tin foil off of squash) with olive oil, salt, pepper. Roast for 20 minutes. Flip. Roast another 15 or so minutes.
While squash is roasting: cook quinoa (or farro, who cares, we’re eating grain bowls I know quinoa isn’t a grain that’s not important right now). Bring a generous 1 1/2 cups of water and 1 cup quinoa to a boil. Cover and lower heat, simmer for 15 minutes. Once timer goes off, fluff, cover for 10 more minutes. Set aside to cool. Now, this is what I meant to do, but instead of turning off the heat after cooking for 15 minutes… I didn’t. I cooked it for the 10 minutes I meant to steam it for, and wound up with the bottom stuck to the pan. It’s pretty good though I’m calling it “crispy” quinoa.
If you are using a tough green like kale or collards, wash and chop into ribbons. If you are using arugula, because your CSA keeps giving you arugula, wash and dry. Maybe give it a rough chop?
If you don’t have red onion pickles that you absolutely must use this week, make some. A dish like this really wants a pickle (what doesn’t?), but also if you don’t add a pickle… who cares!
Once squash is done, set aside to cool. If you are using kale or collards you can mix while still pretty warm, but if you are using arugula you want everything to be fairly room temperature.
Mix sauce. I like using mayonaise because it makes it creamier, and because I’m from georgia. You can use olive oil if you prefer.
Shave some parmersean if you’re using it.
Mix everything in a largeish bowl. Lo! you have produced dinner.