One Woman's Culinary Adventures

Ever since my son became gluten and casein insensitive three and a half years ago, I've pretty much cooked without gluten and dairy (except for the periodic bread-baking for my daughter -- if you'd like a lovely sourdough starter, holler!). On top of that, I love belonging to a CSA (community supported agriculture) and I take it as a personal challenge to use all the lovely produce I get each week from lindentree farm. If I can't, I feel that I've somehow failed. So you can think of each week as a series of iron chef episodes featuring a different vegetable.

Over the years, I've learned to use up weekly bunches of kale, even kohlrabi (I'll get to those in a later blog entry), and a wide variety of common and uncommon greens, but I've never really come to terms with parsley. Nearly every place you look, the way to consume lots of parsley is to make tabouli, but that requires bulgur wheat and that's a non-starter in a gluten-free household. Last year I tried gremolata, but truth be told, I was the only one willing to try it and I didn't really care for it very much. In a pinch, you can clean and freeze parsley and use it thoughout the year. However, as an indication of how much parsley we eat over the course of a year, I've still got frozen parsley from last summer.

So, this year, I set out to make a parsley-full salad -- something resembling tabouli, but edible by everyone in my household. I call this gluten-free tabouli (the recipes I found online for this vary in their ingredients, from cauliflower to soy granules to gluten-free textured vegetable protein, none of which really appealed to me).

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup millet
  
• 1/2 cup quinoa
  
• 1 cup water
  
• 1 cup orange juice
  
• 2 large tomatos
  
• as much chopped parsley as you'd like
  
• 3-4 scallions or some chopped onion (or as much as you'd like)
  

Cook the grains in the water and OJ (rinse grains first then add liquid, bring to a boil, reduce heat to low and simmer 20 minutes). Chop the parsley, onions and tomatos. Mix everything together and add salt and pepper to taste. I'm sure that tabouli bigots everywhere will stick their noses up at this, but I think it's pretty good and it uses up a fair bit of parsley.

Stay tuned for an upcoming edition when I write about 101 ways to use up a prolific summer squash garden.