Lunch/Dinner Recipe 12: Quinoa Paddies

These paddies have a lot of taste and go well with a simple salad and/or some steamed vegetables. You can also make the smaller and have them as a bite size snack on their own. They are delicious both warm and cold so this is also a great lunch option. The below ingredients is a mix I have found to be very tasty, but you can add other ingredients to the mixture such as mushrooms, pine nuts, chopped spinach etc.

Ingredients (making app. 16 paddies)
1 cup of red quinoa, boiled as per instruction on the pack (add a bit of vegetable bouillon granulate to the water for extra taste). While I normally am very happy to substitute freely between red and white quinoa, for this recipe it is quite important to use red quinoa. You could mix a bit of white quinoa in, but white quinoa does not have quite enough 'bind' for the paddies to hold together.
100 g feta cheese, crumbled
½ medium red onion, finely chopped
2 handfulls of fresh herbs, finely chopped (I used flat-leafed parsley and mint)
2 tblsp capers, chopped
1-2 tblsp lemon juice
2-3 tblsp gram flour (this is chickpea flour which I use to 'bind' the mixture in order to make the paddies)
Season with salt and pepper
Vegetable or olive oil

While boiling the quinoa, prepare and mix the feta cheese, red onion, herbs and capers in a bowl. Add the boiled quinoa when it has cooled down a bit and season with lemon juice, salt and pepper until you are happy with the taste. Thereafter add 2-3 tblsp of gram flour to make the mixture more sticky so that you can form paddies.

Heat up a non-stick frying pan with a bit of vegetable or olive oil. Scoop a large 'packed' tablespoon of mixture onto the pan and flatten/form it into a paddie - don't make them too thick or too big as they will not cook as well and if you make them too big, they easily fall apart. They tend to feel quite 'fragile' but once cooked for a couple of minutes on each side and cooled down a bit, they firm up.

Serve with a salad and/or steamed vegetables.