Monday Nutrition Tip of the Week: Quinoa with Sweet Potatoes

My Mom keeps her eye out for interesting recipes printed in the Fort Worth Star Telegram, and many of those she clips for me are from the Cowgirl Chef, Ellise Pierce. She has great, healthy recipes that mix surprising ingredients together with grand results.

This recipe is called "Quinoa with sweet potatoes, spinach, tofu, and chipotle vinaigrette," and it's sort of a salad, sort of a main dish, but all good. I fixed it last week as a main dish for dinner and ate it as leftover lunch after that. It can be served warm or cold, and it's a protein-packed way to fill up without weighing you down.

One note: I didn't fix the dressing that came with it because I didn't have any sherry vinegar, grape-seed oil, or chipotles in adobo. I just used regular old balsamic vinaigrette and it still tasted great!

Quinoa with sweet potatoes, spinach, tofu, and chipotle vinaigrette

-1 large sweet potato, peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes
-3 tablespoons olive oil, divided use
-Sea salt and fresh ground pepper
-8 ounces tofu, cut into 1-inch cubes
-2 cups water
-1 cup quinoa
-1/2 cup pecans
-Handful of baby spinach leaves
-Chipotle vinaigrette, recipe follows
-1/4 cup fresh cilantro, roughly chopped
-Lime, for serving, optional

1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. In a medium bowl, toss the sweet potatoes with 2 tablespoons of the olive oil. Lay out on a foil-lined cookie sheet and lightly sprinkle with sea salt and freshly ground pepper. Slide into the oven and bake for 20-25 minutes, or until the edges of the potatoes begin to brown.

2. In a small bowl, toss the tofu cubes with 1 tablespoon of olive oil and lay on a foil-lined cookie sheet. When the sweet potatoes are done, slide the tofu in for about 10 minutes, or until it is slightly crispy.

3. While the sweet potatoes and tofu are roasting, make the quinoa. Remember, it is always a ration of 1:2, quinoa to water. Put 2 cups of water on to boil. When it boils, add the quinoa, give it a quick stir, cover and turn the heat down to a simmer. Let cook for 10 minutes, and let rest another 10 minutes before you uncover and fluff it.

4. Roast the pecans by putting them in a dry cast-iron skillet over medium-low heat, stirring every now and then, for about 15 minutes. Roughly chop and set aside.

5. Assemble the salad. Fluff the quinoa and put into a large bowl, add the sweet potatoes, tofu, spinach and chipotle vinaigrette, and gently toss. Top with chopped cilantro and pecans and serve with limes wedges on the side, if you'd like

Nutritional analysis per serving, based on 6, without chipotle vinaigrette: 282 calories, 16 grams fat, 28 grams carbohydrates, 8 grams protein, no cholesterol, 18 milligrams sodium, 4 grams dietary fiber, 51 percent of calories from fat.

Chipotle vinaigrette
The heat of the chipotle is a nice balance to the sweet potato in the quinoa salad. This vinaigrette would also work well with any Southwestern-style salad.
-2 chipotle chiles (in adobo)
-1 shallot, minced
-1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
-1/8 cup sherry vinegar
-1/8 cup balsamic vinegar
-1/2 cup grape-seed oil or another light oil
 -Sea salt and fresh ground pepper

Finely chop the chipotle chiles and put them in a jam jar along with the shallot, mustard and two vinegars. Shake to combine and let rest for 15 minutes. Add the grape-seed oil, shake again, and taste for seasonings.

Nutritional analysis per 2-tablespoon serving: 164 calories, 18 grams fat, 1 gram carbohydrates, trace protein, trace cholesterol, 41 milligrams sodium, trace dietary fiber, 97 percent of calories from fat.

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Workout of the Day

P90X Yoga. It was the most painful yoga I've ever done thanks to our workout yesterday, an absolutely killer CrossFit workout of the day (WOD). Zach has been keeping tabs on the CrossFit WODs for the past few weeks, searching for new weekend challenges for us to try. He came across this one last week:

1 mile run

100 pull ups

200 push ups

300 squats

1 mile run

The lap around our neighborhood is one mile, and we've got all the necessary equipment for the other stuff, so we decided to try it out. 

First one mile run: easy. The WOD instructions said you could break up the pull ups, push ups and squats however you wanted, so we decided to do 10 rounds of 10 pull ups, 20 push ups, and 30 squats. 

By round three I was quite certain I wouldn't be able to finish. I was putting my feet up on the wall for the vast majority of pull ups, and at about the fifth set of push ups I started doing 10 normal and 10 on my knees. The squats were the least of my problems. I kept at it, though, and completed all 10 rounds. My last round of push ups were even all on my feet -- no knee push ups!

Then I took off on the second mile run. My body has never felt so weird! My arms were flailing all over the place like chicken wings. I felt like I didn't have much control over my body. My stride was really short, but then all of a sudden I'd get a burst of energy and I could make a normal stride. Then I'd tighten up again. I finished the second mile run in 9:34, and completed the entire workout in 48:34. Not too shabby!

But you know what felt shabby this morning? My upper body, which is completely fried. Yoga was so hard this morning because I cannot hold my arms up for any decent amount of time. Glad this is a recovery week!