I tried a new recipe tonight and it involved using the bag of quinoa we’ve had in the cabinet since I thought I would be creative with cooking and bought it over the summer.

Here are the assumptions that I had about this interesting new food…

1) I thought it was pronounced quin-ooo-a.

2) I thought it would be a hybrid of rice and pasta and very similar to couscous.

3) Based on assumption #2… I thought it would be very similar to cooking rice or pasta, or even couscous.

Here’s what I learned tonight.

1) It’s pronounced keen-wa.  I was no where near correct in that one.

2) It kind of was like rice or pasta or couscous… but not at all soft or tender like those others.  It has it’s place, but doesn’t really fill that comfort food carb niche.  Still working on finding the perfect meal with this grain.

3) It was not like cooking  rice or pasta…

Why was it not like cooking rice or pasta?  Oh, because it crawls out of the pot like a live animal!  That is probably something they should put on the box.

It started off pretty normal with boiling water, putting in the quinoa, and then I turned down the let it simmer, per the box instructions.  I even put a slightly smaller lid on pot so it wouldn’t boil over (as rice and pasta do) while it was simmering.  I walked into the other room and a few minutes later started to smell burning.  Not totally uncommon w/ our stove, but it really smelled like smoke this time.  I walked into the kitchen and found not only had the quinoa (a grain, mind you…) crawled up the side and popped right out of the pot, but some of the pieces had caught fire and burned to black where the flame touched.

So, lesson learned. Do NOT leave quinoa alone in the kitchen.

On a related note… now accepting interesting quinoa recipes for future dinner experiments.