In Praise of Ancient Grain

Quinoa 365
By Patricia Green & Carolyn Hemming
Whitecap, 195 pages, $29.95

Quinoa 365 authors Patricia Green and Carolyn Hemming are sisters trying to eat well and prepare healthy food for their families. They are not nutritionists, just grateful daughters who dedicated this book to a mother who made them eat alternative, healthy things until they began to enjoy how such foods horrified their friends.

This is not your typical healthy life style food book. Instead of preaching to a choir of cultists, they stick to their kitchens and create 170 recipes that employ the ancient grain in most diverse ways. Personally, I have long enjoyed using quinoa as a substitute for lentils in soup and for rice. Thanks to the sisters’ book, I now use it liberally in making desserts and breakfast items like chocolate cake, pecan pumpkin pie and cranapple crisp, pumpkin pancakes and crepes. I wouldn’t think of mixing up a fruit cup without it.

The quinoa-crusted fried chicken recipe ranks with chicharon-crust for crispy frying. As expected, the soup recipes are quite good, in part because the sisters do not abstain from employing chicken stock.

Sample recipes are available on line at http://quinoa365.com/recipes.html