Archive | October, 2012

What’s for Dinner Wednesday: Quinoa, Black Bean and Corn Salad by Haile Thomas

3 Oct

Quinoa, Black Bean and Corn Salad was on the menu at the Kids’ State Dinner at the White House in August.

Ever since our trip to DC for the Kids’ State Dinner, I’ve had a list a mile long of things I want to make that we either had on the trip or are recipes in the cookbook (free download here) we received from epicurious showing all the recipes from the other winners. One of the things I’d heard about but had never tried til DC was quinoa. It was in one of the dishes we ate at the White House, and it is now today’s recipe.

A few weeks ago I picked some up and I spent some time reading about what it is, how you cook it (has to be rinsed first in most recipes) and what kinds of things you eat it with. Even though I had the recipe for today’s dish, I actually used it first to make muffins, which four out of five of us liked, so you’ll see that at some point in the future too.

Caroline was so excited that we were finally going to try out this recipe, it’s been at the top of her list too!

Last week we tried out Haile Thomas’ recipe. Haile is from Arizona and Caroline and I both loved her dish when we had it in DC. Haile is 11, and the cookbook blurb states that they began experimenting with quinoa when the family gave up eating white rice when her dad learned that he was a diabetic.

“The secret to [the recipe’s] success is that ‘all the kids love it, the ingredients are affordable, it’s easy to make and it’s just plain good,'” Haile’s mom says in her quote. They say it can be served hot or cold and I agree. We had ours as a side dish with quesadillas and again, the same four out of five of us loved it. I guess quinoa is now going on Alex’s Don’t Like List.

Coincidentally, just as I finished typing this, I found out that Haile is featured in this month’s Food and Flourish Magazine. In fact, she’s not only featured on pages 26-31, but she’s ON THE COVER!

If you haven’t tried quinoa before, I highly recommend it. I’m thrilled to have another healthy option for side dishes with our meals and I’m glad so many of my family members love it!

**Any modifications I had to make for this recipe I have put in parentheses. **

Haile’s Quinoa, Black Bean and Corn Salad

Serves 6

I love all of the colors in recipes like this. We definitely “ate a rainbow” with this dish!

INGREDIENTS

2 (15 ounce) cans of organic black beans (ours weren’t organic) drained and rinsed
4 cups fresh corn (we used a bag of frozen, cooked but not hot)
1 pint cherry tomatoes, quartered (I chopped up a large tomato)
2 cups cooked quinoa
1 medium red onion, chopped (I used half, it was large)
1/2 bunch fresh cilantro or flat-leaf parsley (I used dried parsley)
2 avocados, pitted, peeled and cut into cubes
1 Tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1 lemon halved (mine was bad so I used lemon juice instead)
Sea salt

DIRECTIONS

In a large bowl, combine the black beans, corn, tomatoes, quinoa, cilantro or parsley, red onion, avocados, and olive oil.

Squeeze the lemon halves and add their juice to the bowl.

Toss to combine, then season to taste with salt and serve.

Cook’s note from the Thomas family: To make this dish hot, warm it on the stovetop of in a microwave, or saute all the ingredients together and add the avocados and cilantro or parsley after it’s plated.

This was a perfect side dish for our quesadillas last week!

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This is what I am the most proud of this week

1 Oct

I’m trying out something new for this school year. We’ll see how it goes!

Well, we’ve been in school exactly one month now. That means at our house, approximately 300 papers have come home from school between the two schools and the three kids.

I say this with slight exaggeration.

Slight.

We get a ton of papers home daily, weekly and monthly and I’m sure we’re not the only family drowning in notices, tests, quizzes, homework, art work and the like, for 180 days a year.

I’ll also tell you…I’m a saver.

Not a hoarder, there’s a difference. I’m a saver, safekeeping, keepsakes.

I’m also, as most of you know, a former teacher, so I have those types of tendencies as well: bulletin boards, displays, things like that.

Put it all together: my dining room is my classroom. I’ve been known to have classroom-style calendars on the walls when my kids were little, sticker charts encouraging good behavior, paper chains counting good deeds or days until something starts or ends, and papers on display; tons and tons of papers.

I also use that space to hang all their crafts and birthday cards. Hallways too.

With so many kids, there’s so many crafts, cards, artwork and good papers to display. It can get overwhelming.

This year, our Summer Timeline is still on the wall. I wanted to take it down but the kids weren’t ready yet. I only just got the second half of the summer’s pictures up on there, so they wanted some additional time to look up on the wall and remember their summer before I take it down to save it. (For a keepsake.)

That meant though, that there wasn’t really a good space to start displaying school work as it started coming home these past few weeks.

In the meantime, we’ve been spending the last six months or so doing some work on our house and I came across some unused items from a Stampin’ Up! class I once taught, as I was cleaning out my office. Those items included some magnetized display boards which can stick to a refrigerator.

BINGO.

I had an idea. I had five or six of those display boards. I had a sharpie marker. I took the marker and on the bottom of the display boards I wrote “This week…I am the most proud of this!” on three of the boards.

I stuck them on my fridge, one above the other. (We only just recently removed all the alphabet magnets from the fridge door, so there was a perfectly empty space there for about five seconds before I re-purposed that space.)

Now, each child can go through the papers they bring home that week, or whenever they bring them home, and choose the item they are the most proud of and stick it in the display until another paper comes home that they are even more proud of. It can be a piece of artwork or a test or a homework page that was hard, or really whatever they want.

When I taught, student portfolios were huge. They were a chance for the students to show what piece of their work meant something to them, without someone choosing for them. Many times the piece you think is important, isn’t and to them another piece has more meaning for a reason you don’t even realize. At the end of the school year, the students got to take their work portfolios home and they’d have a year’s worth of work to show, all pieces that were memorable for them.

So that’s what we’re trying out at my house this year. We’ll see how it goes. I still have the urge to cover my “bulletin boards” aka dining room walls with stickered school work, but for now, I’m trying to refrain. We’ve got a birthday coming up anyway….I’ll be able to fulfill that urge by putting up birthday cards instead.

I’m still saving all the good papers though.

Keepsakes. For later.

Saving. Not hoarding.

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