Vegetable Quinoa Smash

Tonight was crazy experimental dinner night. The result = Vegetable Quinoa Smash. 

Looks tasty right! It came together as a result of not having many groceries and wanting to try something new. 

Its basically quinoa, spices, tomato sauce, and vegetable broth. 

Here are the ingredients. 

It was a random mixture of 2 recipes I saw online about 5 minutes before we started cooking. I literally Googled quinoa + tomato sauce and a surprising amount of recipes came up. Here are the two recipes I saw:
http://chinasplate.blogspot.com/2012/03/vegetable-quinoa-with-tomato-sauce.html
and
http://www.savvyvegetarian.com/vegetarian-recipes/spanish-quinoa.php

To start: I boiled some quinoa in water while I schemed what to mix with it. So water boiling in pot 1 while we evaluated what was in the pantry.  

The quinoa is just in Ikea tupperware because we buy a lot of the Whole Foods bulk items then store it at home.

While that was boiling in pot 1 (I only let it boil for a few minutes then simmer for about 12 minutes) we began mixing the rest. 

In a different pot, BSod started with the spices/herbs. He took a little extra virgin olive oil and combined oregano, cilantro, garlic powder, crushed red peppers, and a tiny bit of cumin. 

To add a third multitask cooking event, we didn't have vegetable broth, but we did have vegetable bouillon so we microwaved about a cup of water and added one cube then stirred. Bam! - vegetable broth. 

Back to pot 2. 

In pot 2, BSod then added a small can of tomato sauce and about 3/4 of the vegetable broth to the spices. It looked like tomato soup or boring chili at that point. He would NOT try it but I thought it tasted good. 

While pot 1 of the quinoa and pot 2 of the sauce were simmering, we opened the corn and black beans. I added a tiny bit of season salt to the black beans (I accidentally bought the healthy/less sodium yucky plain black beans). 

Now it was time to mix it all together. Quinoa (water drained of course), spicy tomato vegetable broth, corn, and black beans. If I had ANY other vegetables I would have considered adding them to the mix. Maybe squash or zucchini or even carrots. None the less, we had somehow come up with a tasty soup type invention. We added wheat crackers with sea salt for a little crunch. I'll be honest, this ended up tastier than expected. 

The quinoa did expand the whole time, which brought out more and more tasty swirlys. 

Someone made a happy bowl! 

The End!