Toasted Quinoa with Okra, Tomato, & Shrimp

My friend Holly introduced me to quinoa last winter, however, I never made it until the other night. Fate, more than anything, brought me to this recipe. I saw quinoa on sale at coop the other week when I was there, and decided to pick some up not knowing when/if I'd actually get around to making it. I had bought some okra quite a few months ago, canned of course, as it reminded me of my trip to Louisiana in Jan/09 and figured I needed to diversify my veggie intake. And I usually have a large supply of canned tomatoes of varying preparations but my stock has run exceedingly dry lately, so I picked up a couple cans at Walmart last week.

So as the story goes, our roomate Trevor (friend of Mike's who's in taking a welding course) bought this HUGE bag of shrimp a few weeks ago at Costco. Now, I've cooked shrimp like four times in my life... not a huge shrimp fan and don't really know what to do with it other than a quick white wine shrimp pasta (ooh , I should post the recipe for this) or just plain old fried garlicky lemon shrimp.

So Mike and I are browsing through my pantry, trying to come up with some other pairing for shrimp other than pasta. He finds my box of quinoa! On to the world wide web I go to find a recipe for quinoa and shrimp. After maybe browsing four recipes, I come to the most perfect recipe in the world ---- (perfect = I have all the ingredients!!!). So Mike and I set out to make this, and we had a blast! My mom was enjoying entertaining Gray, while mommy and daddy were busy in the kitchen and we all had fun.

The recipe for this is: Toasted Quinoa with Okra, Tomato, & Shrimp

The only substitution I used was hot pepper sauce instead of dicing up hot peppers... oh and I don't have a fine enough strainer so I kinda just added some water to the quinoa to rinse it in a bowl. It took a bit more time to toast, but still turned out fine. I also used 1/3 cup more chicken stock as I didn't want 1/3 cup sitting in my fridge!

I really truly enjoyed this dish and it's much different than the casseroles that I usually make. I'd highly recommend trying it as it uses ingredients that aren't common staples in Saskatchewan! If you do try it, let me know what you think!