Recipe: Quinoa with Broad Beans & Dill

Growing up, rice with broad beans & dill or what we call in Kuwait “Bajela w Shbent” was a favourite lunch dish of mine. It is traditionally made with chunks of meat and daqqos tomato sauce at home but I’ve always opted to mix it with low fat yoghurt instead. I was craving it the other day but since I’m still on the path of losing the Ramadan weight and testing out quinoa in recipes I’ve decided to make the dish, subsituting rice with quinoa and see how it would turn out. To my surprise the recipe turned out to be a success and had I not made the dish myself I wouldn’t have realised I was actually eating quinoa! 

I prepared the quinoa as I’ve done before in my Quinoa & Pomegranate salad recipe and Quinoa Mushroom Risotto which doesn’t take much time, only fifteen minutes maximum.

Basically for every measure of quinoa you use double the amount water with a sprinkle of salt, put them together in a pan and bring to a boil on high heat then reduce the heat to medium-low and let simmer for 15 minutes until all the water is gone and the quinoa is double in size. Here is a video I found on Gcalories blog that explains it better. You know the quinoa is done when it looks like this.

I measured the amount of quinoa I needed for my recipe and kept the rest in a tupperware in the fridge for future use. It keeps very well and doesn’t spoil quickly so whenever you need it all you have to do is take it out of the fridge, fluff it a bit with a fork, and consume immediately.

What else do I need? A bit of vegetable oil, salt & pepper, some frozen broad beans (green bajela) and some fresh dill.

Ingredients – serves 2:

12 cups of COOKED quinoa (about 320g cooked quinoa) – one tablespoon vegetable oil – 1-1.5 cup frozen broad beans – a bunch of dill, chopped– 1.5 cups water – salt & pepper – low fat yoghurt – some tamarind concentrate (optional).

You measure the quinoa, the broad beans, wash the dill and give it a nice chop which should release it’s grassy fragrance, it smells like freshly cut grass which I adore. Once you are ready it’s time to cook.

In a non-stick pan add the tablespoon of oil then add the chopped dill and the broad beans. Mix for a bit until you see that the broad beans have thawed a bit.

Add enough water to cover the dill and beans mixture, add salt and pepper.

Bring the mixture to a boil.

Once the mixture boils add your quinoa and mix. Then add water just enough to cover the surface of the quinoa rice, beans, and dill.

Let the water bubble away and reduce, when it cover the pan with some aluminium foil, cover with a lid, and reduce the heat. Let it simmer for about 20 minutes.

In 20 minutes take the pan off the heat and take the lid off, your quinoa, beans, and dill is now done and ready to be consumed immediately.

Serve and get ready to dig in.

I personally like to eat it with low fat yoghurt.

I also had a bottle of Tamarind concentrate which, if you add just the right amount, will give a tangy sweet edge to your dish. Too much of it will be too sour though.

Yummy indeed! My favourite quinoa dish so far! Familiar yet modernised and more diet-friendly.

I need more ideas on cooking quinoa, even though I’m not much of a fan of hot quinoa but using it in dishes like this with lots of flavour didn’t differ much from using rice, flavour wise anyway. If it looks good, it tasted even better than it looked.