How are your New Year’s resolutions going?

Now that we are 11 days into 2011, I must admit that I’m doing great on some accounts and terrible on others.  While I’ve been doing ok with clean eating, my workout plans have been derailed thanks to the fact that everyone has been sick around here.  One thing that I have done that I’m excited about is get together a collection of some of my favorite quinoa recipes for my email subscribers.  It should be an automatic download for those who sign up to my list by tomorrow and I’ll also be sending it out to those already subscribed.   This is something I meant to do for the entire second half of last year yet somehow I never got around to it.  It even has ***gasp*** pictures.  Ok, three of the recipes have pictures, but it’s a start, right?

Anyhow, today I thought I would share with you one of my favorite recipes for Quinoa Stuffed Peppers.  The inspiration came from clean eating magazine, but the original called for rice and had sour cream in it so it was ripe for a make-over. J

While I would not necessarily put this on my list of easy quinoa recipes, this is another recipe that is much easier if you cook your quinoa ahead of time and have it ready in the refrigerator.  If you haven’t done this before, quinoa keeps for a week making it easy to cook once and have it on hand to add to several recipes or even just a simple salad.  If you know that you are going to be pressed for time, you can also prepare the filling for this recipe a day ahead of time.

I served these peppers stuffed with quinoa grain to my parents last week and they couldn’t stop gushing. In fact, except for my boys who just haven’t grown into the idea of peppers, the whole family enjoyed it. I hope that you will enjoy it too.

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Quinoa Stuffed Peppers

Ingredients

1 cup of black beans, drained and rinsed

1 cup of cooked quinoa

½ cup corn

1 tomato, diced

1 zucchini, diced

½ onion, finely diced

5 cloves garlic, minced (divided)

¼ tsp chile powder

½ cup fresh cilantro, chopped

Olive oil spray

1/8 tsp sea salt

1/8 tsp ground place pepper

4 poblano peppers

½ cup Mexican Blend cheese (reduced fat)

½ cup non-fat greek yogurt

½ chipotle canned pepper in adobo sauce (you can freeze the rest of the can)

1 lime, juiced

Directions

1.       Preheat oven to 375.  Mix together beans, quinoa, corn, tomato, zucchini, onion, 4 cloves garlic, chile powder, cilantro, salt and black pepper.

2.      Spray roasting pan with olive oil spray.  Cut peppers in half and discard seeds.  Place ½ cup of stuffing mixture on each pepper.  Cover with foil and bake for 45 minutes.  Uncover, sprinkle with cheese and bake another 10-15 minutes.

3.      In a blender combine yogurt, chipotle pepper, lime and reserved 1 clove of minced garlic.  If you don’t have the chipotle pepper substitute cayenne or dried chipotle

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By the way, thanks to several of our readers I just found the best new cookbook!  If you haven’t checked out Raising the Salad Bar: Beyond Leafy Greens–Inventive Salads with Beans, Whole Grains, Pasta, Chicken, and More, I highly, highly recommend it.  I’ll be reviewing it soon, but you can check out other reviews here.

Tagged as: Adobo, Black pepper, Chili powder, Chipotle, Garlic, Olive oil, peppers stuffed with quinoa, quinoa, quinoa stuffed peppers, Recipe, vegetarian stuffed peppers quinoa