Roasted Carrots with Feta and Mint

I hardly did any cooking this week somehow, but on Tuesday evening for vampire night, it was my turn for salad. I went outside the box a bit with my definition of salad, and made Michael Symon's roasted carrots with mint and feta.

I followed the recipe pretty much exactly, but I allowed the carrots to completely cool and served it as a room temperature salad. Also, I used some all goats' milk feta-- I think it might be one of my new favorite cheeses! The dish was pretty fantastic, and accompanied Mandy's greek chicken gyros perfectly!

The sweetness of the honey, the tang of the vinegar, and the savory cumin really made the carrots pop. They would have been great alone, but with the feta and mint , this dish was fabulous!  The only negative is that while roasting the carrots, my pan got basically destroyed-- no matter how much scrubbing I do, I cannot get the burned cumin honey off. I guess it was worth it? If I did this again, I think I would omit the honey from the initial roasting phase, and actually, I might parboil the carrots and try to finish them on the grill instead of in a hot oven.

Tim is going to be planting a lot of carrots in his deck garden this summer, so I can't wait to try this again with some home grown beauties!

Super food Tuesday

Who knows why this popped into my head today, but I decided to prepare some quinoa for dinner. I have only used it in my cooking once or twice before, so it's definitely out of my comfort zone still.

I prepared the quinoa according to package directions but with chicken stock instead of water to add a bit of flavor-- obviously, veggie stock, or white wine could be used instead of you're vegetarian. I also added in the juice of half a  lemon, and a after I turned the burner off, I threw in a handful of chopped fresh basil (from my "garden" and rosemary which I had on hand). While the quinoa was cooking, I sauteed one thinly sliced baby zucchini and some crushed garlic in some olive oil. At the last second I added in a diced fresh tomato and salt and pepper to taste. The final step was to toss the now fluffy quinoa with the sauteed veggies. I kept the pan on low heat during this step to continue cooking and added in a handful of shredded Parmesan while tossing.


The dish was actually pretty decent. I think that the lemon juice was really what took it from bland to fresh. Normally, this would be a good side dish, but since the quinoa has such great food value it worked just fine as my main dish!