Zuke attack: Quinoa and grilled zucchini salad

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One way to counterattack overabundant zucchini is to fire up the grill

Kevin Purdy, a journalist working in Niagara County, wrote the following post. 

I found 101 Cookbooks about two years ago, while I was desperately searching online for a way to make an interesting dish out of quinoa, a grain my wife adores and I thought sounded like a snooty new restaurant.

I fell in love with the site when they helped me pull it off.

Ever since, I’ve kept regular tabs on Ms. Swanson and her recipe brainstorms. Her fresh ideas for meals, culled from a truly impressive collection of recipe tomes, kept me from realizing she was serving up mostly vegetarian dishes until after a month of reading.

But I kept checking her site, and about two weeks ago, Heidi’s persistence yielded a great, healthy dish that helped me score serious points with the in-laws.

We found our apartment stocked with zucchini after one of those family visits that turns into a trunk-stuffing challenge during the last 10 minutes. We pledged to not let the stuff wilt into mushy oblivion and find a suitable recipe for it – only to catch sight of the squash a week later, propped up against the microwave, still untouched.

Just as we were preparing to head to Wegmans and sign off on another fresh produce opportunity, my feed reader blinked from my computer desktop with a new item, a blessing from the RSS heavens with a familiar twist: Quinoa and grilled zucchini salad, topped with a cilantro-avocado dressing.

The recipe is fairly straight-forward, but a few tips gleaned from our first try:

• Rinse your quinoa before cooking. It cooks the same as rice on the stove top, but is done a little bit faster, so don’t lose track.
• Follow the recipe’s guidelines for slicing the zucchini 1/4-inch thick, or you’ll risk slipping a few through the grill. Even with a generous hand, I lost one little guy to the charcoal demons.
• Full zucchini rounds make for a nice picture, but we should have cut them up before tossing them in the dish. Hunger, as always, trumped common sense.

Between the eggs, feta, zucchini and quinoa, this makes a filling stand-alone meal, and maybe a great way to stand out from the sea of mayonnaise-based salads at your next potluck.

Charcoal – is there anything it can’t do?

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Filed under grilling, recipes, vegetables