The benefits are many. You take some of the guesswork out of the nighttime dinner scramble, you get so comfortable with a recipe’s basics that you can tweak it to your (and your family’s or guests’) desires and, perhaps most importantly, you increase your kitchen confidence every time you cook it.
Sometimes, a dish is so appealing that it enters your repertoire immediately. And sometimes, it can take years and several iterations before a dish makes the leap from “Let’s try this” to “When are we having that again?”
The latter is the case with this recipe, based on a concept I first started playing with a dozen years ago, when I was looking for ways to improve my opinion of quinoa. One of my favorite cookbook authors, Heidi Swanson, combined it with egg, cheese, dried breadcrumbs, chives, onion and more to make little patties you pan-fry until crispy. I really liked them, but I felt the need to add cooked barley to make them more toothsome. And I spiced them with curry powder, among other changes.
Fast forward several years, and I revisited the concept through an America’s Test Kitchen recipe that followed a similar outline, but with freshly made breadcrumbs, spinach and sun-dried tomatoes, and topped with a little yogurt. So good. But something still kept them out of my regular rotation. What was it? I’m not sure.
Recently, I went back to the idea, this time adding chickpeas to the quinoa instead of barley, plus fresh cherry tomatoes and scallions. I wanted to veganize the recipe, so instead of eggs, I used a go-to substitute (at least when it comes to binding): vegan mayonnaise. The chickpeas added texture and protein, but not as much of the latter as I wanted, so I started thinking about a nut-packed topping. I remembered loving a pumpkin seed salsa I had tried years ago from chef Hugo Ortega, so I simplified that to go on top.
While still delightfully crispy-edged and savory, these cakes are more delicate than the previous versions, so I like to roast rather than pan-fry them, making them less messy to get on the table. Maybe that’s what made the difference, or maybe it’s just the appeal of the universal combination of beans and grains, but I’ve already cooked these several times since I first developed them.
Actually, that’s only part of it. This recipe has entered my repertoire because it’s two dishes rather than one. You can eat this salsa with a spoon, so its uses seem virtually unlimited. I know I’ll find plenty of other directions to take it.
