Jill Murray

I promise you this much: If you cook anything “on a bed of” anything at home, you will feel super, extra cool while you eat it. Ditto for “portabello wine sauce.” This is some way-cool pro menu terminology we’re getting into here.

No one needs to know that the corn and spinach were frozen or that you made the sauce out leftover wine already mixed with tomato paste from a different recipe you screwed up yesterday.

Here’s what you need first:
1 cup quinoa, washed
2 cups vegetable broth (no-salt-added ), or water
6 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cayenne

Here’s what you need after that:
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1 cup diced celery
frozen corn, 2/3 cup per person
frozen spinach, some
2 cups white beans, cooked, rinsed, drained, mashed
1/4 cup chopped onion,

Here’s what you want to do:

• Wash it really well. It has a nasty, bitter coating that needs to be rinsed off first. But this step is easy. You can totally handle it. Especially if you have some kind of really fine sive at your disposal. That really helps.
• Throw the quinoa broth, garlic, sea salt, and cayenne in a sauce pan, cover and bring to a boil. Once boiling, simmer for 15 to 20 minutes. Check it at 15 to be on the safe side. Mine was just exactly perfect at 15, and if I’d waited 30 seconds longer, I’d a been sad.
• To the quinoa, add salt, corn, beans, onion, and celery. Stir it up well so it’s all evenly mixed.
• Refrigerate with the lid off until it’s cool enough to mold with your hands without burning yourself. You can also refrigerate overnight or until you’re ready to use it, and that will totally work but the fun thing about using it while its still warm is that it bakes so quickly and evenly.
• Grease a baking sheet or put down some parchment paper, even if it’s a non-stick pan. This is important. Croquettes are sticky little suckers and you don’t want to leave the bottom half of ‘em on the pan when you go to remove them.
• Using your hands, take about 2 tablespoons of mixture at a time, shape into log shaped pieces, and place it on the baking sheet. You can make them about twice that size if you’re looking for something more main-coursey too. That’s what I did.
• If the mixture seems a little dry or crumbly, and it is difficult to form the croquettes, add some water until it gets a little mushy so that the croquettes can be easily formed, and so they stay together. If the mixture seems a little too wet, add some brown rice
• If you have one of those cool Misto gadgets, you can spray a little oil on each croquette to make them brown all purty and give them a lightly crisp crust. If you do not have a Misto and are thinking of buying any old generic sprayer, stop right there and get the Misto. I had a generic one, and I left it on the counter overnight with my copy of the Complete Vegan Cookbook, and come morning, all the oil had leaked out, and been absorbed by the book, and now the first half of my favourite cookbook is practically see-through. Be ye not so frugal. Get the Misto.
• Bake in a 400 degree F oven for 35 minutes, or until they are light golden brown and crispy.

Serve over a bed of corn and spinach, which you can just heat up in the microwave (I also added a squeeze of lemon and a dash of salt and pepper to mine),

(Yeah, I know mine aren’t log shaped.)

and spoon tomato sauce over it.

If you neglected to totally mess up a sauce yesterday and don’t have dejected ingredients sitting around, you can use any tomato sauce you like. For mine, I:

• sauteed some onions
• added garlic
• tossed in roughly most of a can of tomato paste that was already mixed with almost a full cup of wine
• threw in some herbs for good measure– the usual suspects: oregano, basil, rosemary.
• and a nice big portabello mushroom, sliced razor thin to portabello perfection
• I brought it to a strong simmer, then reduced heat to low and just let it sit there while I made the croquettes

Servings: 5 (4 meals and 2 snacks)

Verdict: These were really filling and the whole combination of everything all together was spectacular. Not only were they a good meal, but they’re a great snack, cold the next day, dipped in leftover sauce. Next time I make croquettes, I’ll probably use a more flavourful bean, and put more seasoning in the croquette itself, to make them more of a stand-alone.

I didn’t have to buy any ingredients today, so the cost hasn’t changed yet.

Cumulative total servings for the whole pot ‘o beans: 11