Friday, February 17, 2012

The Many Faces of Orzo

Yesterday afternoon I had to get groceries and run some other errands, so I did not feel like rushing home to cook dinner. Instead, we went to Souper Salad. It's a good place to eat with little kids because they can get all their favorite finger foods from the buffet. And they have compartmentalized trays to keep it all separate, which is becoming very important to someone.


Salad is a rare sighting on these pages, I know. But every so often, I do crave one.


This morning I had hemp granola mixed with Kashi blueberry flakes. Do you use hemp products in your cooking? I just picked up a used copy of Dreena Burton's Vive le Vegan and she has a whole section on cooking with hemp, but I'm not really familiar with it. I like the nutty flavor of this granola, though.


For tonight's dinner I wanted to make the Orzo Pilaf with Tofu Feta from Vegan on the Cheap. However, a thing of orzo at my supermarket was nearly $8. I don't know if it was organic or flecked with 14k gold or what, but it was the only kind of orzo they had, and I wasn't paying that.

Luckily, I saw this...


I checked the ingredients on this bag of "rosamarina" pasta against the orzo and, yep, it's the same thing. And it was $1. Dinner was a go.


I made the tofu "feta" a few days earlier and let it soak in the olive oil/lemon juice marinade that gives it its tangy flavor. So this dinner took all of 20 minutes to make, including boiling the pasta water. And it was yummy. The orzo was a bit messy for Jackson and Olivia to eat.  Bigger pasta shapes could be substituted if you're feeding this to small children. I would bring this to a potluck -- it's great at room temperature.


Have a great weekend!

2 comments:

  1. $8 for a bag of orzo does seem really pricey. We get ours in the bulk section of the co-op, which is always really cheap. Looks like all kinds of good things in the orzo salad!

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  2. Looks good. And no, I haven't done a lot with hemp. I started experimenting when we lived in Denver, but in small town WY it is too expensive to experiment with.

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